First Succesfull overclock

[iainstott]

Hi guy's, have been reading this forum for about a year, trying to learn asmuch as i can, without drooling too much.

I have tried overclocking a couple of times, without any succes, and over a number of years.

 

The first time i tried was with an AMD x64 x2 +4400, on a Asus A8Ne.

At that time i wasnt really interested in how the cpu and motherboard work, just wanted to get the most out of my money.

 

This time round I have;-

Intel Q6600 G0

Asus P5QL-Pro (bios 1004 A3)

4Gb DDR2-800

xFx 9600GT

 

So i picked up a copy of this months CustomPC magazine, and in it there is a brief step by step walkthrough on what you need to change in the bios to overclock t Q6600 (among others). So i was reading it, and it cleared up some of the confusion i had in my head about the bios and how to overclock, so I thought to myself "lets crack this thing open an see what i can do".

 

The article claims that you can go from 2.4GHz stock, to 3.4GHz on air cooling(with the use of a decent Heatsink & fan). At the mo, i'm using the standard intel h/s + fan, so didn't want to push it, I was aiming just to see if i could get a succesfull overclock because i can see myself spending some money on new hardware if i were not to FAIL.

 

Anyway i followed the article, changed the Bus Speed to 340Mhz, changed the DRAM Frequency to 757Mhz(closest to the rated 800mhz of the ram) and upped the core voltage to a maximum of 1.300v.

That gave me an effective clock speed of 3.07Ghz

 

Booted into windows fine, ran coretemp and cpuz to confirm overclock and monitor temps through light use.

 

All temps were well below 55' so was fairly happy with that.

Just thought i'd put it under some usage, un-rar'ed 3gb archive, sweet, temps rose a deg or two.

Then i thought id encode a film onto DVD, was running along quite hapily (and a lot quicker than it used to), temps were slowly creeping up. When they reached 65, i aborted, shutdown and reset everything in the bios and have decided to leave it stock untill i have read up and experimented a little more.

 

Am going to read throught the article's on here regarding overclocking c2q.

But I am going to ask for some advice and help here first so i can hopefully read through it all together and get a better idea of what i need to do.

The questions I have are, and I'm sorry there's so many,

 

What temp does everyone consider their "Redline" for their cpu.

Does anyone have any experience overclocking using the motherboard i have, and if so what does everyone make of it, Overclocking purposes only. (personally dont like it, only cos i have been unsucsesfull at gettin OSx on it)

Recommendations for a good heatsink

Recommendations for a good LGA775 Overclocking motherboard

Edited January 15, 2010 by iainstott

[Hyper]

Hi guy's, have been reading this forum for about a year, trying to learn asmuch as i can, without drooling too much.

I have tried overclocking a couple of times, without any succes, and over a number of years.

 

The first time i tried was with an AMD x64 x2 +4400, on a Asus A8Ne.

At that time i wasnt really interested in how the cpu and motherboard work, just wanted to get the most out of my money.

 

This time round

 

 

Well, what ya get the Q6600 to?

[iainstott]

Sorry, pressed submit instead of preview.

Have edited first post to full story.