Anyone here overclocked a Intel Q9450 before?

[chotto69]

Hi,
I'm really impressed with this CPU: coming from a not particularly brilliant
E6600, I have to say that this is great.
Currently I am achieving 3.4Ghz leaving everything in auto. My temps are 30 idle and below 50 at load, no matter if OCing or stock.
So far I've not been able to break the wall of FSB 425 but I suspect there should be something related to memory settings and/or NB rather than CPU's fault: I own a Gigabyte X38 DQ6 which is quite picky with memory timings (my mem: 2x2GB OCZ Platinum DDR2-1000).
Any suggestion appreciated, thanks :happy:

 

[Nagasama]

you might try upping the NB voltage to 1.4 or so.
my idle temps BTW are :
37
34
37
33

**** yeah!

 

[chotto69]

you might try upping the NB voltage to 1.4 or so.

Thank you, I'll try that. Do you know what's the stock voltage for the NB? My mobo doesn't show absolute values but only increments (+.10, +.20, etc.) of the stock voltage

 

[Nagasama]

i believe it is 1.2 or 1.3V

 

[PhikMan]

Hey nagasama, what sorta settings did you have to tweak to get ur q9450 stable at 3.5? ive been trying to get mine to go but i just cant get it...

 

[Nagasama]

FSB frequency : 435
fsb to nb strap : 333
DRAM @ 1045 5-5-5-15
performance level : 8
Vcore : 1.225
GTL reference : auto
PLL voltage : 1.5
FSB termination : 1.4
DRAM : 2.1
NB : 1.3
cpu clock skew : 400ps
NB clock skew : 100ps

 

[gurusan]

hey nagasama best to set the PLL voltage to 1.52 - 1.56 as it overvolts by something nasty like .2 or .3v if set to 1.5....otherwise it only overvolts around .02v.

For future reference never put any of the voltage settings on Asus boards on auto or their default settings...especially the P5Q series.

Also that's a lot more NB vcore than you need. I would drop it down to 1.22 or so....you also should be able to run PL 7 at 430fsb.

 

[Nagasama]

i'll give it a shot. thanks for the info. i think my oc fails if i lower the PLL any more. or maybe its the VTT. ****, now i cant remember.

 

[Nagasama]

wont boot at PL 7.
i'll set the PLL at 1.52 and see what happens. i dont know why i thought you meant lower it when you clearly said to raise it.

 

[chotto69]

Bumbing NB voltage up (Vcore still on auto) I was able to achieve 3.5 Ghz. However, according to Everest's tests, performance-wise it's worst than my 3.4 Ghz previous setup (about minus 5-10% in all tests). I believe this is due to the performance level that changed from 7 to 8 which does have an impact on memory bandwidth and ultimately in how data is transferred between CPU and memory.
I think I'll stick to 3.4Ghz: performance and temperature are great and I don't even feel I am OCing!