Q6600 + 4 or 8GB RAM

Just curious if anyone has overclocked either 4 or 8 GB ram and maybe the differnce between them with a Q6600. After reading many threads on this forum about motherboard this and that. Honestly it looks like most motherboards are about the same when it comes to OCing (within performance levels of course) I'm leaning towards a DFI because I'm a heavy tweaker and I have owned 3 DFI board with 0 issues. Where I have had 3 Asus Socket 7 board die on my in about 3 months for each board (high end board with very little overclocks)

At the moment I'm looking at the DFI LP LT P35 T2R unless someone can convince me otherwise... Anyone out there do some Overclocking with 2x2GB and/or 4x2GB ram?

almost nothing uses 4Gb of ram let alone 8. Regardless, more ram means more stress on the northbridge and will likely lower your overclock potential.

I'll point out right now that most of the new Intel based motherboards on the market will not OC easily with four DIMM's installed. This puts extra strain on the memory controller and makes it harder for it to pass data between the processor and the memory. The Intel MCH's suffer from it and so do the Nvidia MCH's. The DFI P35/X38 motherboards are better suited to do this, but it won't be easy.

I can't see anyone running more than 4GB of RAM. Only a few situations would apply such as; Running a server with a 64 bit O/S with multiple VM's, or running Photoshop, AutoCAD, and a few programs in the background on a 64 bit O/S. XP/Vista 32 bit won't register any more than 3.5GB due to kernel limitations (Vista SP1 doesn't make it work either, it just makes it display 4GB in Welcome Center), so I hope you have plans for your O/S choices.

Running P5K Dlx here with 2 x 2 dimms (Gskill 4gb PC8000 PQseries) , 400FSB no issue, 450 neither... but rams itself are limited to max 1081mhz and I toasted already one set so I keep these ones at 1002mhz ( according the bios) and they work fine... only thing I noticed being differently from 2 gigs is the extra voltage required on the NB...

Also on the P5K I still run my old good and trusty WinxP Pro so it uses only 3.2gb's : though loading times , namely mostly in Quake4/ Quake ET wars I can notice the difference and it jerks less at map starts... I wouldn't run any pc at only 2gb's with the current cost of ram...

The Foxconn Mars board handles 8gigs of ram like a champ.

Check out Tony's thread

I'm having a bit of hard time getting my ip35pro and q6600 with 8gb ram overclocked. Even with 1,4volts to cpu and small raises to all other voltages will give me crashed after playing ~30mins. And I've tried like 2,8-3ghz, not 4ghz :) So yes it's true that it's much harder to clock with all 4 ram slots full. I guess I should give another go for oc'ing but I try to work with the pc too so I don't have time always for random crashes etc. :P

EDIT: I'm retarded :clap:

Fun idea, a co-worker told me about some artile he read where they put 8 gigs in a 64 bit (obviously) vista machine and disabled the page file all together and it ran badass. Though it really wigged out when they managed to fill that 8 gigs apparently. Wish i knew where he got it then i could read it for myself/ link it.

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Originally Posted by mr_knowitall15

Fun idea, a co-worker told me about some artile he read where they put 8 gigs in a 64 bit (obviously) vista machine and disabled the page file all together and it ran badass. Though it really wigged out when they managed to fill that 8 gigs apparently. Wish i knew where he got it then i could read it for myself/ link it.

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There was one article at the *crap*.... sry Tom's Hardware about it :p: Yes it's possible to disable the page file but I really doubt you will get that much more performance. With 8gigs and raptor for OS, I have 12gigs swap file and no problems with performance :)

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Originally Posted by 3lfk1ng

If you want 8gigs of ram... and still want to use only 2 slots... here is a solution.

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Btw did you even read the product page?

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GeIL Evo One 8GB(4 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Quad Channel Kit Desktop Memory - Retail

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4 pieces of 2GB memories = 4 slots :) AFAIK there's not yet any memory out there that is 4GB alone. As for DDR2 that is.

I have 8GB ocz ram and the highest oc I can reach with my G0 Quad is 3.3GHz (ortho stable for 2 hour). 377 FSB, X9 Multi, 1:1 ratio. It might not be the best oc but I think is because of my old 975x chipset fsb limit, I didn't even have to max out all the NB, cpu, and memory voltage to achieve that. I am sure you can do better on a P35 or X38 chipset.

oh man! I missed that :dammit:

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Originally Posted by cheets

AFAIK there's not yet any memory out there that is 4GB alone. As for DDR2 that is.

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Yeah, I was the same way till I found what I thought was 2 x 4gb.... the dream is nice though.

One more thing, actually I reached 3.5Ghz with 8GB ram, although not stable but I manage to run some tests. The only noticeable performance difference compare to 3.0GHz is only when I do rendering in after effect. The 0.5GHz speed gain lower my render time by 30 sec. But beside that, I really can't notice any difference in games like World in Conflict and Crysis or Vista load up time...

when I ran 4 sticks on my ip35 pro, I had no problem hitting 450x8 FSB..anything over that though was a no go. I replaced the ram with 2x2 sticks..can hit 495 FSB now..but I dont run that 24/7 regardless.

4 stick's in general isnt a good idea if you can help it on consumer boards

i got 4x1gb sticks of D9 GMH in Gigabyte P35-DS3P running at 400-4-4-4-12 and 1.8v without any problems, cpu is q6600 at 3200 (8x400) at 1.24v or so, ya its not a high clock but im happy with mhz/timmings/voltage, the chipset voltages are also low, the same as when i only had 2gb

i do have 4x2gb that i plan to stick in but they got those not as good micron chips that cant oc much anyway, i did try them a little and i think it was more IC limited than chipset

Q6600 8x416/1000 here on ASUS P5K Pro, 8GB G.Skill PC8000. I have four of these in my mini-cluster.

Runnin 8gb in my P5E@451 fsb, 5/6 ratio, no issues....:cool:

Can run higher, but takes crazy volts to northbridge....

Im not asking whether I should be using 8GB or 4GB or ram, I have pretty much decided that I will decided depending on the performance hit from 1 to the other (if that makes sense). I'm asking if anyone has used both, overclocked both and the results they came up with. I know there is most likely going to be a overclock hit, but wondered if anyone had tested it... I'm looking for max stable, best performing overclock, I don't give a :banana::banana::banana::banana: about benchmarks. Also I am leaning towards 8GB of ram for 2 reasons. It is mega cheap, hell I can get 8GB of DDR2 1000 (PC2 8000)for $220. And I want this machine to last a good 2-3 years.

Worst case if no one has tried overclocking these 2 configs I think I'm going to buy 8GB of ram anyway because my friend will be upgrading soon. Do some hardcore testing then make my decision and of course I will post my results here if I go that way. And if I don't need 8GB well I'll just sell it to him.

Also I'm sick of waiting for the Q9450 and after thinking about it I think I'm going to get a Q6600 and be happy considering some of the dead e8400s I have been hearing about with moderate overclocks. The other big thing that is turning me off is Q9450s are not supported out of the box for most (if not all motherboards right now) and considering I don't have ANY intel chips in my possession or can get a hold of I'm stuck not being able to upgrade the bios correct? Q6600 is supported out of the box if I'm not mistaken. If I get some solid responses on this issue I may order everything within this week and finish modding my box and setting up the watercooling loop to begin testing.

You ought to be more than happy with the Q6600, and 8gb man, i havent had any issues, cept with Vista flakin out sometimes.. I ran the same setup on XP-64 with 0 issues also....... :cool:

No performance hit for me. Still running my Q6600 @ 3.6 ghz with 8 GB...Vista really does like the extra ram. :D

My rig below is working great as well. Vista + SuperFetch + 8 GB FTW.

4GB is quick

but 6 or 8 GB is where its at in vista, it is 10x more responsive than 4gb

IMO with RAM prices where they are why not do 8gb?

With that many GB's, I might start considering ECC ram if I was at all concerned with data integrity. For a gaming system, it's irrelevant. For a workstation, it's almost mandatory.

Vista "flaking out" may very well be caused by ECC errors with that much RAM.

EDIT:

To give you a rough idea on how many "soft" errors you'll expect:

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Q: Come on... cosmic rays? Really, how often does this occur?

A: The Ram Guy consulted with some experts on this one. Basically, it's a statistics problem. But, when you do the math, a soft error is likely to occur in a system with 256 Mbytes of memory about every 750 hours! And, the more memory you have, the more frequently soft errors will occur.

Q: Is that such a big deal?

A: You tell me. At two hours a day, 750 hours is once a year. Probably no big deal. But, at twenty-four hours a day, it's a month. That's not sounding so good, now...

If you're emailing and word processing, a crash is an inconvenience. If you're serving web pages, a crash can be disastrous! It's really up to you...

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http://www.asktheramguy.com/v3/showthread.php?t=38141

So once a month with 24 hr usage with 256mb of RAM. So times that by 32 (4 X 256mb X 8 gb) for your 8gb and you're looking at a potential error every day in a month.

I use to have 4GB (2x2GB) of Gskill DDR2 800 HZ, the highest stable oc I reached was 3.4GHz on my Quad... but again I oc to 3.0GHz for daily use.

I have no problems using 4GB at 400 fsb :) only 2 sticks though.