It takes some time and patience to get the 45nm chips to OC well. GTL's play a MAJOR role in overclocking these chips, as well as VTT and NB volts. It took me almost 4 days to find the workable settings for my chip on my board.

BTW Memtest will fail if your other settings are not correct.

Larry

Quote Originally Posted by Justintoxicated View Post
Well I guess my CPU is officialy = the suck.

I successfully got the new bios installed. I can now get into windows at over 400 FSB.

However! my maximum stable overclock is still 3200x2 ALL STOCK VOLTAGES.

I tried upping the NB voltage to 1.4, CPU to 1.4 1.36 1.24 etc and could not get prime stable at even 3300 MHZ on my Q9450. Even tried playing with the VVT a bit. Core 2 fails right away in prime no matter how much voltage I feed tot he CPu over 400 FSB.

However at all stock voltages and it seems prime stable @ 3.2 ghz. This is my first intel CPU in several years but I have never had another CPU that overclocks off stock volts, but does not go any higher when adding voltages.

I tried to Memtest @ 450 mhz and my memory failed (8GB G.Skill DDR2 1100 5-5-5-15). Why would memtest fail? Could the CPu being crazy unstable at that FSB cause memtest to fail? It seems fine at 400 FSB, but that is not what I paid for.

Really Really Disappointed in my upgrade from my old Opteron 165. If I could do it again I would have stock with the opteron 165 setup for another couple years. I'm not seeing a huge difference in performance from this PC and my 3 year old opty 165. Not worth the price difference anyway.

So is m CPU just a dud? Should I pickup another one? The Fuzion WB is keeping temps under controll and the new MB waterblock is nice, but I guess I don't really need either one since I'm only running stock voltages...