Quote Originally Posted by jmpage2 View Post
Hi guys, yet another fresh faced addition to the growing crowd of BX2 owners.

I'm wondering if I can get some advice. I've just put the rig below together and this is my first overclocking project since I overclocked a 300A Celeron to 450mhz back in the golden days of overclocking.

Right now the rig seems to be walled at 350mhz FSB. I've managed to overclock the memory bus to 266/667 for a healthy overclock of its own, but even with a 1:1 divider I can't seem to get any more out of this E6600 than 3.15 ghz. When I try to go to 366mhz I get a BIOS POST error (watchdog is disabled) and if I give a little more voltage to the FSB/vcore/etc then it will boot but starts to fail Prime95 testing.

At 9X350 the rig is a rock with all the default voltages. I was even able to confidently install the OS at this overclock since the system can run Orthos, etc, for 8+ hours at these speeds and be totally stable.

Does anyone have any ideas for squeezing a bit more juice out based on my settings below? CPU temps are idling around 38C and peaking at 62C according to TAT. It surprises me that the temps are as high as they are, the Zalman 9700NT is supposed to be a well regarded cooler.

Components;

E6600 (week 36 A stepping)
BX2
Corsair HX520W PSU
OCZ PC8500 5-5-5-15 2X1GB RAM (a real letdown, won't even run stable at 500 mhz with these timings)
EVGA 8800 GTS OC
Gigabyte Poseidon Case
2X Seagate 250GB 32MB Barricudas in an L1 RAID

Some screenshots of my BIOS settings below, if I'm missing something obvious let me know, I'm happy with what I'm getting out of it now, and don't want much higher temps, but when I bought the parts I was hoping for a healthy 9X400 overclock.

Thanks!!!


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My Badaxe2 is topping out at 370 fsb with vcore 1.425 fsbv 1.4 and nb 1.55. No matter how much more juice I give it, the system will crash even at 371 fsb. I'm running an E4300, so I wonder if it's the processor. It's still strange that the system will crash even with 1 more mhz on the fsb. 370 is rock solid with the 266 memory setting running 1:1 ratio. Does anyone know what can be done to squeeze a few more mhz without having to go to the 333 strap? I like the low latency/speed of my RAM right now as I'm able to get between 7300-7400 MB/s on both Sandra's integer and floating point calculation with the Patriot sticks at 4-3-3-10 with 2.0v.
This is a bit off topic, but I can run my RAM at 3-3-3-10 timing with the 370 fsb at 1:1 but I have to up the voltage to 2.2v. Is it worth feeding the Patriots an extra 0.2v to get the tighter timming in real world performance? It seems like the Badaxe2 does a good job with the low latency. For those of you running your RAM at about 700-800 mhz, what kind of numbers are you hitting from Sandra? Is my RAM speed somewhere in the neighborhood of respectability while running 740 mhz effective speed