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guzzidom

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  1. I managed to do it with an old socket A HP I had by finding out what the motherboard was and updating the BIOS to the nearest equivelant "after market" one, but this was a high risk strategy and I wouldn't have done it with my only PC, it was only limited success anyway because even the shop bought version of the MSI/HP board wasn't an overclock friendly unit. however it did add quite a few bits to the BIOS.
  2. Leave the Vcore at about 1.35v, lift your ram volts to about 2.2, loosen the timings to 6-6-6-17, add a tiny bit to your northbridge voltage and if you can't make any more there is probably some other settings in BIOS (I'm not familiar with your mobo) that needs to be switched off/on, disable things like spread spectrum etc. Read X-Bit Labs review of your board, it's quite possible you've got the ram set to "Turbo" when it needs to be set to std for proper overclocking, etc etc. Something certainly seems to be getting in the way and I'm pretty certain you'll find it in the (somewhat complex) BIOS, sorry I can't be of more help, you'll need to read up on the specifics for your mobo rather than the rather "one size fits all" advice i've given so far.
  3. The Zalman should be fine up to 3.8- 4ghz, after that I would personally think about water., test it yourself, if you are getting any more than about 68 degrees after a couple of hours of P95 then it's probably worth backing off or thinking about water. The 45Nm's aren't happy really above 1.4v or 75 degrees (not a criticism of the chip mind, they are normally chucking out 4.6ghz by the time you get those sort of settings/readings)
  4. Only 5 minutes of Prime95 per 20mhz or so of CPU speed until you get to 3.8 ish then it's worth giving it half hour or so, then once you've got to 4ghz give it a good couple of hours. It's worth taking your time IMO, you could just crack it up to 450mhz and then work your way down the settings to get it to boot but that's even more tedious and a lot more alarming.
  5. That'll do for starters, you might want to loosen the ram timings a bit if it is set at 5-5-5-15, set it to 6-6-6-17 or similar, put the CPU to 1.3 (std is 1.26 on mine) and start bumping the fsb, if it becomes unstable set your CPU to 1.35 and set your ram to 2.1, finally if you are struggling past 4ghz try setting your northbridge voltage up a notch from std (I haven't needed to touch it until 4.4ghz). Stress test every 5mhz fsb after 3.6ghz and it's all at your own risk.
  6. I guess there's some variance between the chips, apart from anything else mine's an EO stepping. it tends to be happy with stock voltage all the way to 3.7 and then only needs 1.32 to get to 4.2 (at which point it's all getting a bit toasty for my tastes). I'm considering going W/C for the CPU and Northbridge to see what I can push this thing to without having 65 degrees under load (@ 4.2ghz + 1.32v), I'm only using a cheapo Arctic Cooling 7 Pro. The biggest problem is that my rig lives inside a computer desk which means the temps get a bit too much. Even now at stock volts and 3.62 ghz it idles at 39 and Prime95 loads at 58, I'd like to see about 7-8 degrees less TBH. Worst I've seen is 1.38v/ 4.5ghz at which point it's idling at 48 degrees and loading at 69 (and gradually rising a degree or so every half hour) too hot so I backed it all off.
  7. 3.6-3.8ghz is more than respectable on air cooling, though I'm surprised you needed to go to 1.38v to get it.
  8. The same surely goes for whether to bother with quad core for primarily gaming though doesn't it?, anE8400, E8500 or E8600 clocked to 4.2ghz (easily achieved) is going to give that much more in games due to the sheer speed, re the OCC review of the E8400, at stock speeds there wasn't a lot the quads got ahead on, and sometimes then not by much. I just hate the thought of a couple of cores just sitting there doing nothing when you could have a full 8ghz and 6mb of cache fully utilised. Like Horny sez, build a nice fast 775/ DDR3 rig (Asus P5Q-3?) and then in a year or two when the I7's are commonplace and cheap change the mobo and cPU.
  9. No, they do a similar thing with my P5Q-VM, they say "for dual channel operation use yellow slots" (other way round to yours oddly) and don't mention the black slots at all, I assume this means if you are only using 2 sticks of ram use the yellow slots first (otherwise it will run in single channel mode), need a better translator / manual editor I think.
  10. It tripped me up too until I worked out what was going on, it seems the P5Q boards have a tendency to be overly kind to the ram straight out of the box. Careful of the load temps, the 45Nm's really take off over 4.4ghz after about an hour of Prime95, I'd personally think about stopping now and stress testing it for the rest of the evening to make sure it's all OK. Not many people have got the E8400 totally "everday" stable above 4.7ghz (not that that is anything to be sniffed at in itself TBH) P5Q/E8400....ace combo
  11. First things first, check your ram is running at the correct voltage, one of the odd little features of the P5Q chipset is that it tends to run the ram at it's lowest possible voltage (running my patriot 2.2v sticks at 1.6v!). Leave the CPU voltage stock, that's generally fine for up to 3.7 ish. Back off the ram timings a couple of notches (I'm assuming you are using decent 800mhz sticks) to something like 6-6-6-16 (or lower if you've got low latency sticks). Then open the AI suite and bump the FSB up about 10fsb at a time until you get to about 375mhz, then run prime 95 for about 30 minutes watching the temps, if that all works ok bump the fsb 5 mhz at a time, running Prime95 for 5 minutes or so each time until you get to 400mhz, then run Prime95 for a couple of hours, followed be the Everest stress test for about an hour. If you have a stock cooler I'd pat yourself on the back for having a 3.65ghz chip and call it a day If you've got a good aftermarket air cooler, now might be the time to slip the CPU volts up to 1.3-1.32 and step the ram up by 0.1v and start coming up 5mhz at a time, giving it the Everest Stress test for at least an hour each time, if it starts to fail you might want to increase the Northbridge voltage a teensy bit and bring the CPU up to 1.36. Now's the time you want to be keeping an eye on the temps big style. The sort of RAM, and the timings could possibly be the deciding factor long before the CPU reaches a limit (especially if you've w/cooled it) so give details TBH these chips aren't fond of volts over 1.4-1.45 (and don't need them either to be fair)
  12. That rig should sit happily at 3.8 - 4 on good air and will likely sit at 3.5 ish on a stock cooler, I've got Patriot Extreme Performance Ram with my P5Q and she'll go to 3.5ghz without touching the timings or any voltages, if I loosen off to 5-5-5-14, well I haven't found the end of it yet (chip gets a bit warm), at least 2000mhz bus speed. Mind you they do run at 2.2v stock!.
  13. Have a look at Tom's CPU charts to get a rough idea of the gaming performance of the quads vs the dual cores, a few games will favour the quads under certain circumstances, but (from memory) the higher clock speeds of the E8***'s tend to minimise this and in other games where 4 core utilisation is less integral it whups them good. For example http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/desktop...0x1050,820.html And that margin will only get wider with the 45nm OC potential. Up to you though, none of them are any better/worse, just different strengths in different applications, work out what's important to you and buy accordingly. OCC review the E8500 in the relevent section and pit it against the E6600 and, frankly the 4 core gets a massive kicking in the majority of the benchmarks, even pipping it in some where you would of thought the extra cores give it some unequivecol advantages.
  14. The E8500 will likely sit happily at about 3.9 without fussing the voltage (my E8400 goes to 3.7 ish before a minor bump is needed to break 4.3), the question is, do you do a lot of video editing or encoding / rasterizing?, in which case a quad would suit you better (most of the time), if you're a gamer first and foremost I'd suggest the E8500 is the way to go (try to get the latest EO stepping if you can), buy a decentish air cooler and there's no reason why 4ghz wouldn't work with a minor bump to 1.32v,or so as an every day clock speed (avoid anything above 1.4v on air in my experience, and avoid 1.5v even on water 42/58 deg temps approx at 1.32v/4ghz). Forget the Phenom really, good chip though it is, it doesn't approach an O/clocked E8500 for pumping out gaming framerates unless the game is thoroughly optimized for 4 core. If you do go X-fire capable have a look at the OCC Asus P5Q pro review http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/asus_p5q_pro/
  15. Alright, not the most technical review out there but the P5Q overclocking BIOS deeper features have already been covered by OCC (and they are all the same) so I'll largely stick to the features that differ between this and the other boards in the range. After using Asus boards in a couple of recent budget builds and being somewhat impressed by their fuss free installation I have just used this board for my latest home build, I was strictly budgeted so I went for a board with integrated graphics so I could get a decent card after Christmas. Anyone not familiar with the P5Q range should note this comes from the lower end of the (vast) spectrum of different models, some supporting DDR3, others with inbuilt Wi-Fi, some with X-fire support and some of the upper echelon models with all of the above and tricksy Northbridge/southbridge passive cooling and 8 phase supplies, the VM model differs from the lowest end model by three main features, RAID support and integrated Intel X4500HD graphics and an mATX size. This is a DDR2 board with support for up to 16GB ram (with the usual caveat of a 64 bit O/S). An all pervading reason to use this board over some of it's competitors is the usage of solid Japanese ceramic capacitors all the way through the build. Firstly installation was a breeze without the sometimes massive spring tension between the I/O plate and the motherboard I/O connectors that you can get with budget boards. All connections were very well placed for my conventional build (optical drives and PSU at top and HDD's at bottom) and no XP driver (F6) floppy was needed to get SATA HDD recognition during XP install The BIOS being largely the same in this respect right the way across the range, is an overclockers toybox (more of this later), however this board has only two seperate fan headers beyond the CPU one so it may limit the hardcore OC enthusiast in this respect (though fan controllers are hardly difficult to obtain). With an E8400 and Patriot Extreme Performance 800mhz 4-4-4-12 ram loosened to 5-5-5-15 a simple FSB bump saw 3.8ghz without altering a single voltage setting and 4.5ghz took a simple bump on the CPU to 1.32v (I've heard the hard of thinking bemoaning the 45nm chips lack of ability to take voltage, here's news, they don't need to take it like the 65nm, try your E6800 on a budget air cooler at 4.5ghz with 1.32v and see where you get!), at this speed with an Arctic Cooling 7 it was running too hot for my tastes (my PC lives inside a closed PC desk with little airflow) with a 48 idle and a 67 load, backing off to 3.6 allowed me to tighten the rams timings up, drop the voltage back to stock and has run SuperPi for 2 hours without lifting over 48 degrees, that's 20% free performance with all stock voltages and ram timings. Now to the wierder bits, first off you'll see your "system temperature" hovering around the 50 degrees mark, this is NOT your northbridge temps (you'll be amazed how many people out there on the wonder web are assuming it is!), it is solely because the temperature sensor lives in the top right hand corner of the board, tucked in a still pocket of air between your PSU and your optical drives, it's of no concern at all unless you are as paranoid as me, in which case you'll move one of your optical drives down and mount 2 X 80mm fans on one 12v supply in the vacant drive bays (blowing backwards). This will instantly make this reading 25 degrees and settle your nerves no end. The Northbridge does get fairly hot, certainly about 40c to the touch (under stress testing), giving at a guess around 50 degrees on the chip (upper range models will monitor this for you), not a concern as it's thermal overload is around the 75 degree mark. The more expensive models in the range have a heatpipe connecting the north/southbridge chips, though, as they are still passively cooled with not a lot more heatsink real estate I can't imagine the situation to be radically different. Another strange element is it automatically picked up my 4-4-4-12/2.2v ram as 5-5-5-15 and 1.4v and this had to be corrected in BIOS, this may well be a feature of the ram to be fair but it's worth looking out for. A feature of this entire range of boards is the tiny little copy of Linux they've included on an onboard chip, they call this ExpressGate but it's terminology and look will be immediately familiar to anyone who's dabbled with Linux in the last couple of years, in short it presents a splash screen just before the main OS boots which if you click on it will take you to an interface whereby you can access the web / skype etc without actually going into Windows. Asus make a big deal of this taking 5 secs, which it does, except then you have to click on the "web" icon which takes another 5 seconds, still from cold machine to Google in ten secs isn't bad (time your normal method!). Where this comes into it's own is it's lack of dependency on the OS and it's latitude for your overclocking mistakes, I accidentally left the ram at 4-4-4-12 and bumped the FSB to 450mhz, ExpressGate still worked fine but going to the OS simply took me to a warning that my OC had failed and into the BIOS, if I couldn't figure out what I had done there is no reason I could see that I couldn't go browsing the web for my answer, because of this I suspect at the point of loading ExpressGate the mobo is running at factory default (I could be wrong). I didn't hold out much hope for the Intel DX10 graphics but was astonished that it would happily run Doom 3 at medium settings, a fair bit of eye candy and never drop below 50fps ditto HL2, OK it's not Far Cry 2 but if you've used any other Intel IGP's you will see this as nothing short of a miracle. So, in short, If you have no need for Wi-Fi, DDR3, X-fire, 8 phase power, or maybe have a midi case that won't take the full ATX boards of the dearer brethren then buy with confidence, especially if you want to tweak the best out of your CPU, also if you wish to make a Photoshop machine or integrate it into a HD tv setup then using the Intel X4500HD graphics will give you full 1080/Blue Ray ability at super smooth rates and the lack of motherboard fans render it (obviously) utterly silent Downsides Obvious lack of features of upper echelon boards based on the same chipset Only two fan headers Silly placement of case temp sensor Only one IDE slot (fairly common these days) Only one PCI slot (If more are needed, at a similar price point buy the P5Q-SE, though that is a larger board and has no IGP) Expressgate could easily have included CD/DVD burning with NTFS recognition (like a lot of other Linux distro's) which would have been a godsend if you needed to rescue files in a hurry from a corrupt XP installation No way of setting the ram command rate, stuck at 2T ( a strange oversight as there are at least 20 other ram timings you can fiddle with) Upsides Excellent quality build Great overclocker (with decent CPU and RAM) Surprisingly good onboard graphics (especially for media use) Genuinely useful ExpressGate mini OS Cheap In essence I can see this board sitting with an overclocked E7200 and an 8800GTS as a budget gaming rig, paired with 4gb of ram and an E6600 for a photoshop/encoding/music rendering setup or with an E2200 and 2gb of cheap ram as the centre of a media/tv setup both of the latter making good use of the silence of the IGP and the Asus fan controlling features. Buy with confidence!.
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