Retail Q9650 Overclocking Thread

[NoGuru]

The dreaded lock up before the save. I have faith you will get it next time.

[b1tphr34k]

After reading through many of the posts on this thread I realized that I wasn't just dreaming on getting my Q9650 above 3.6GHz...I previously had it running on an MSI P43-Neo3F, but nothing I did would let me go above 3.7. After reading many of the posts here, I knew I should be able to get more out of it and I became convinced that I was being limited by the low native bus speeds of my board and DRAM (PC2-8500)

After a quick trick to the local Fry's, I picked up a Gigabyte EP45T-USB3P and some brand new DDR3, with the push of a button I was up to 3.8GHz, and with a little extra on the CPU voltage I run 4.05GHz with almost no effort. This PROC is AWSOME!

I'm now Prime95 stable at 3.8 for daily use with ocassional desired to see it at 4.05GHz - hav'n't completley stabilized the 4GHz setting yet as I get a spontaneous reboot when running Prime but generally very happy with this chip - thanks all for your various posts and input that convinced me that under the right environment my chip was capable of much more than I was getting.

[NoGuru]

After reading through many of the posts on this thread I realized that I wasn't just dreaming on getting my Q9650 above 3.6GHz...I previously had it running on an MSI P43-Neo3F, but nothing I did would let me go above 3.7. After reading many of the posts here, I knew I should be able to get more out of it and I became convinced that I was being limited by the low native bus speeds of my board and DRAM (PC2-8500)

After a quick trick to the local Fry's, I picked up a Gigabyte EP45T-USB3P and some brand new DDR3, with the push of a button I was up to 3.8GHz, and with a little extra on the CPU voltage I run 4.05GHz with almost no effort. This PROC is AWSOME!

I'm now Prime95 stable at 3.8 for daily use with ocassional desired to see it at 4.05GHz - hav'n't completley stabilized the 4GHz setting yet as I get a spontaneous reboot when running Prime but generally very happy with this chip - thanks all for your various posts and input that convinced me that under the right environment my chip was capable of much more than I was getting.

Yeah with that board you can get this chip pretty high. Post your settings and we can help you tweak them. Oh, and welcome

[b1tphr34k]

Yeah with that board you can get this chip pretty high. Post your settings and we can help you tweak them. Oh, and welcome

Thanks! so I decided to go ahead and try again - this time I made it a point to back off the memory and only push the CPU.
So far Prime95 table...but definatley appreciate any insight that might tighten things up a bit. Basically, I started with ET6 to 4.05, added PCI=100MHz, upped CPU V1.34, backed off DRAM to standard (2.66D) @ 1200MHz and left everything else auto. I'm not so sure she should be cooking at 72-73 only 10 minutes, but open to suggestion after reading through much of this it seems the MCH and VTT are where a lot of the sweet spots lie? but I'm not sure what I should look for there.
Thanks for your help!