Q9400 + P5B Deluxe overclocking in progress

[pogiman]

Like the many who jumped on the P965 boat, I wanted to upgrade my old E6600 to the newer quad cores. It is pointless for me to spend extra moola on a mobo when my current mobo supports the newer yorkfields. The only advantage to a Pxx is overclocking potential. (i dont need the extra features) Well, I want to let others see that a p965 still has ample amount of juice left and there is no need to upgrade to a Pxx if your mobo BIOS supports the new 45nm quads. I just got in a Q9400 and Im still on the benches to see what this p965 can do. (BTW, I know for sure the mobo can do 500FSB since I ran that on my E6600, with quad core though, thats another story...)

My current settings

Asus p5B Deluxe Rev 1.05 BIOS ver. 1238
Q9400 @3.4GHz Vcore=1.3 (BIOS) VID=1.28 (core temp) Multi = 8
8GB DDR800 5-5-5-15 @ 2.1V
FSB @ 425
FSB Volts @ 1.4V
NB @ 1.45V\
Win 7 RTM x64

From here on, I am only messing with FSB and vcore. I upped the FSB and NB more than I need to make sure that this is not the problem if it fails any tests. So far, no tests failed......on to 3.6Ghz

I will have SS when everything is final

UPDATE:

With the above settings, I was able to do 3.6 Linpack stable. FSB at 450. Temps are 30C idle and 55C load (looks a bit high, I will reseat later) C1E and SpeedStep disabled.

UPDATE2:

So after two days of tweaking and testing with games, various apps, etc, I found that 3.6 @ 1.3V is the sweet spot for this combination. I can get 3.7 everything stable, but it requires 1.33V Thats a huge jump in vcore for just 100 mhz. I was never able to even boot into windows at 3.8, but i can get into BIOS, even at 3.9! Maybe its is the mobo, but 3.6@ 1.3V, I cant complain. I did a reseat of the CPU with an extra thin layer, almost transparent coat of AS5. Temps seem to gone down a bit, but the same problem plagues. Core 1 and 2 are cooler than 3 and 4. Under load core 2 has a lower temp. Also, during tests above 3.7, core 2 usually goes first. Any ideas?





idle temps, looks like a bad IHS solder to the cores?

Another update:
I was trying to see how far I can undervolt and underclock this and I think i found a bug. Right now, I have it at 1.8GHz at 1.12V and on idle, I get the same temps: 32, 31,35,35. Now this cant be true at all since I am running much lower volts and speed. Under load, i get temps 35,34,37,37. This looks very weird and it seems that either the ASUS board is reporting the wrong temps or its a bug in the chip? any one have similar experiences?