Hardware Overclocking Intel's Core 2 Quad Q6600

Wow. I stand corrected. But is it really stable? Try running prime 95 for a few hours on all 4 cores I'm effing impressed that even booted, though.

 

Yup already did mate ran all tests for 3 hours under Orthos.

THe trick is not so much as teh vcore its the VTT voltage that needs upping.

Ran Orthos for three hours after ONE pass of 3dmark 05

cheers

gilgamesh

 

I agree, thanks Tim for your non misleading professional reviews that can be believed

 

Hey gilgamesh,

Welcome to the forums and thanks for stopping by to share your experiences with the Q6600. Your voltages are a little crazy for air, but since you're using water I think you're pretty safe - whatever the case it's an impressive overclock.

The Abit IP-35 Pro is a great board for quad-core overclocking because it's got the GTLReference voltage adjustments - have you played with that at all?

Thanks,

Tim

No problem

 

I have to say, it was a great review up until the Supreme Commander test. I'm SOOOOOO sick of people using the built-in test and thinking that's how you should test quad core support in that game. WRONG! The game makes use of extra cores ONLY if there's enough AI ingame to push the extra cores, and the in-built test only uses 2 AI's. Without a FRAPS test using at least 6 AI's (prefererably 7, the maximum number of AI's a skirmish can use) you'll never see more then the second core at work.

I've seen this game work all 4 cores of a Q6600. It takes one hour of gameplay with the 7 AI's and by the end of that hour all 4 cores are at variously busy levels. BUT! That means the person running the test has to stay alive for that time and be a good enough player against 7 AI's all trying to kill each other and you. If you try this on the stock Supreme Commander .exe without the >2Gb fix added to the .exe, the game will still become unplayable even with all 4 cores churning. This scenario can only be tested properly with the >2G exe fix, 4 cores, and 4Gb of ram. Without those 3 things in place, forget trying to run that scenario and forget trying to find out what games of the future will really need.

 

Ive got an interesting question.
Can a Q6600 be run passive using the infinity?

Ive been thinking of this combo for a while for a machine which basically needs to be silent. With ample airflow can this be done?

 

i dont get the buy joe a pony part -_-

 

Very very good article. Cant wait till my water cooling kit and my cpu arrives.

 

This is very encouraging. I'm putting together a Q6600 system with an Abit IN9 32X-MAX board and water cooling. My plans were for a modest and stable overclock of about 3.0Ghz. Judging by the results here I might bump that up to 3.2GHz or so. Even with watercooling I'd rather keep a step or two back from the "bleeding edge."

 

Want stability? Lower the GTLREF, or NB Reference Ratio, i believe it is. .603 should do you well.

 

Any chance of overclocking and testing your Q6600 with an Asus Commando? I really don't want to buy a new board until the X38 and next gen nVidia boards come out in the fall but $266 for 3.2GHz Quad Core goodness is hard to pass up!

 

I'm having a hard time waiting to ensure myself a G0 stepping atm , I hope they'll be quite "mainstream" in about 10 days .

I'm gonna oc this one with a thermalright ultra 120 extreme with a scythe 1600rpm fan , i might post my results once i'm done with it ^^

 

I think I'm missing something here?
Isn't PC2-8000 memory rated at 1066MHz usually? In the test setup it was stated to be running at 800Mhz, yet CPU-Z shows it running at ~360MHz quad pumped, making it ~1500MHz?!

I've been AMD a while, so not really paid attention to how recent (well.. ) Intel's work

 

thanks for pointing that out. I used to support the e6850 based on the fact that in reviews it would outperform the q6600 in supream commander. but now that I have read what you said I understand why.

 

It's def got "I'm a power user" written all over it, but for my current needs, a quad's just overkill right now. Games, light av encoding, etc...that's all fine w/ a C2D around 3.3Ghz. Does anyone have any other real world apps they're seeing improvements in on a quad?

 

Thanks for your feedback and although I agree with the principles behind what you're saying, it's unfortunately beyond the realms of practicality.

One hour per CPU, 14 CPUs is at least 14 hours just to benchmark SupCom once - I wouldn't ever run with numbers that I've only run once, as there is no guarantee that they're accurate. Thus, we can multiply by at least three (potentially more if I "die" during a benchmark run) meaning at least 42 hours of benchmarking Supreme Commander.

To put that into perspective, I could run around 6 CPUs through the whole of our current CPU benchmarking suite in the same amount of time.

 

not sure Tim, But my guess is you can automate and change the perftest if you wanted to.

May be something to look into over at the SupCom forums for future benchmarking on Quad Cores.

 

AWWWWWWWW n i just went n got an E6850! Anyone know how that overclocks?

Another thing< quad core isn't that beneficial just yet sorta rite?

 

I agree with that. there are some cases where the quad will do a lot better than a dual. But if you look at the majority of games and past games that dont use extra cores, the extra clock speed will got a lot farther.
A lot of people are going quad because they dont want to have to upgrade down the line and for games that support 4 cores the quad will be a better performer than the dual.

 

Wow... excellent review. Pushing the fsb past 1333 (my prime number on a new CPU/build) is what I was looking for.

Thanks Tim for getting this review done so fast, you rock!

Any comments on a ASUS P5N32-E 680i / Q6600 OC combo? That mobo is one I've been eyeing up for awile. Also, how well would a AC 7 pro handle the quad OC?

This will really be my "first" build. At least where I have bought parts specificly for a new PC.

Thanks for having compassion on the noob!