-

Hello Folks - my first thread on this site... been reading a lot of threads and found the members very knowledegable, so thought I'd become a member and ask questions myself!

Ok, I've been fairly successful at overclocking... but want MORE POWER!!!

After upgrading various parts (I have a stockpile of mobos, ram and even CPUs... lol)... this is my current setup:

Mobo: Biostar TP43D2-A7 6.x
CPU: Q6600
Ram: G-Skill 1066 5-5-5-15 1.8v
OS: XPPro
Case: Antec 300
Video: eVGA 9600 GT 512DDR3
Cooling: air cooled using Thermaltake Mini-typhoon with 2-120mm front and 1-120mm rear; 1 - 80mm rigged and strapped to video card and 2 - pci 80mm fans
(noisy... but I use headphones... )

This is my most expensive mobo, so I don't want to fry it .

Admittedly- the last unit was not that great... so I had to exchange it - damnit -- although it might have been my fault

So enough of this - i know it aint my blog -
THE PROBLEM:

I cant get it stable over 3.5ghz... I thought upgrading the ram from 800 to 1066 will give me some more room, but nope.

I've tried 10-20% voltage increases to both cpu and ram and even a little chipset over volting as well... nuttin

The mobo is capable of stock 1600 fsb and I can get the cpu to 3.5, but not stable.

I fear it is down to the nitty gritty ram timings, but wanted to do some more learning before I try it... currently I have it at SPD defaults ... which is 5-5-5-15.

Thanks for taking the time to read my life story and much thanks for any suggestions...

-

I think you are looking at the wrong things. What is your vcore and temps? Also, that board is 4-phase pwm so you won't be able to get super far with a quad sorry to say.

vcore is around 1.2-1.3 idle ...

I didn't do anything with the gpu...

and my cpu temp idels ~42C with system temps ~32C (idle...)

yeah, wish I had known quads dont oc too well before I bought it - but it is running stable at 3.2 at the moment with said settings above .

thanks again for the reply... btw what does 4-phase pwm mean? Is that some form of power regulation?

Thanks ---

Yeah, you need to increase your vcore. If it is that low idle I can't imagine how low it is after vdroop. Also, watch your cpu temps. 40C idle is high for such a low vcore. make sure your 100% load doesn't get beyond upper 60C's. Quads do OC quite well, you just need proper cooling. The 4 phase limitations shouldn't kick in until ~3.6ghz, which you won't get to with those temps.

WOOT -

I think I did it thanks to your suggestion... ran prime and seems stable at 3.5Ghz... here's the settings that ultimately worked:

vcore 1.4v
ram 2.0v
1:1
389x9
fsb 1556mhz

Temps still idle around 28-30c... I might try to redo the thermal paste with somethimg better than what I got now (some generic paste).

I'd include a screenshot of cpu-z, but dont know how to do it in this forum...

Thanks faster3200!

I am glad that worked out for you.

To post images get the images hosted on a site like www.imageshack.us and then just link or use the [img ] [ /img] (without the spaces) tags to post it.