Quote Originally Posted by unclewebb View Post
That's exactly what I found when playing around with my E6400. As the MHz went up I needed to leave more temperature head room to maintain long term, 100% Orthos stability.

Here are my approximate findings:

3200 MHz ~ DTS=5
3400 MHz ~ DTS=15
3600 MHz ~ DTS=25
Cool. Nice observations.

I think you can see this progression of lower temperatures needed for stable higher frequency operation in Intel's specs. The Thermal Specification for the highest frequency processor is lower than that of lower frequency CPUs.

A Q6600 G-0 has
Thermal Design Power: 95W
Thermal Specification: 71C

A QX6850 G-0 has
Thermal Design Power: 130W
Thermal Specification: 64.5C

I think a correct re-wording of these specs for a Q6600 G-0 is that a CPU cooler must dissipate thermal energy at a rate of 95W to keep Tcase temperatures under 71C to prevent throttling at 2.4GHz.

Likewise, the QX6850 G-0 needs a cooler to dissipate 130W to keep Tcase below 64.5C for 3GHz operation.