water cooling??

I bought a RoG Striker Extreme and a pre-owned Q6600. The previous owner
assured me he had run it on air-cooling at 3.5GHz on a P5K mobo. Thinking
that this assured me of a good overclock I built the system with an AC
Freezer7 Pro but it wont overclock past 2.7GHz easy and 2.8GHz unstably.
I've tried everything but it will post but not boot even with all the set
optimally.
Would water-cooling be any help or a complete waste of time. I just wanted
3GHz and spent the money to achieve it.

Robin

"Dumbo" wrote in message
...
I bought a RoG Striker Extreme and a pre-owned Q6600. The previous owner
assured me he had run it on air-cooling at 3.5GHz on a P5K mobo. Thinking
that this assured me of a good overclock I built the system with an AC
Freezer7 Pro but it wont overclock past 2.7GHz easy and 2.8GHz unstably.
I've tried everything but it will post but not boot even with all the set
optimally.
Would water-cooling be any help or a complete waste of time. I just
wanted 3GHz and spent the money to achieve it.

Robin

Inability to boot with given settings is unlikely to be a heat issue. IMO,
water cooling in your situation is throwing good money after bad.
There are no guarantees in overclocking. Just because the seller of your
used CPU claimed 3.5 GHz on air doesn't mean you will achieve the same, even
if you had the exact same hardware as the seller, which you don't.

If you wanted 3 GHZ guaranteed, you should have purchased a 3 GHz CPU.
If you want help with overclocking in a forum such as this one, you need to
post complete details of all your hardware and all BIOS settings that are
not default.

'Dumbo' wrote:
I bought a RoG Striker Extreme and a pre-owned Q6600. The previous owner
assured me he had run it on air-cooling at 3.5GHz on a P5K mobo. Thinking
that this assured me of a good overclock I built the system with an AC
Freezer7 Pro but it wont overclock past 2.7GHz easy and 2.8GHz unstably.
I've tried everything but it will post but not boot even with all the set
optimally.
Would water-cooling be any help or a complete waste of time. I just
wanted 3GHz and spent the money to achieve it.
_____

Well, do you want a guess, or a useful answer? A useful answer will require
more information from you.

Motherboard Make and exact Model; is it also preowned?
Memory brand and specifications
BIOS settings, to include
voltages that can be modified
memory/FSB/chipset clocks that can be modified
memory timings and voltage
memory clock : CPU clock synchronization

CPU core temperatures, heavy load and idle

Thermal compound used

Room ambient temperature

Air temperature inside case

Method you use to test overclocking stability

How you increased the CPU speed (small steps, allowing for interaction among
CPU core voltage, clock speed, and temperature

Your source of overclocking information.

Lacking that, here is my guess: your cooling is inadequate for overclocking
a quad 65 nm Intel Core CPU to your goal of 3 GHz or higher.

For example, my E4300 (stock 1.8 GHz) CPU is stable at 3.02 GHz with a
moderate CPU core voltage increase and a Thermaltake i7 cooler on an EVGA
nVidia 680i motherboard. I believe that my particular CPU will not
overclock to a higher frequency because of heat. Your Freezer 7 Pro is
likely similar in cooling capability, but your Q6600 CPU dissipates TWICE
the heat my E4300 dissipates.

A second suggestion: 'Optimal' settings in the BIOS are likely not to give
the best overclocking performance.

I am also guessing that you are inquiring about water cooling and if that
would be a waste of time. My guess at an answer is that better air cooling
would also work to get you above 3.0 GHz. And, again, the information above
is necessary to get better than a guess.

Phil Weldon









"Dumbo" wrote in message
...
I bought a RoG Striker Extreme and a pre-owned Q6600. The previous owner
assured me he had run it on air-cooling at 3.5GHz on a P5K mobo. Thinking
that this assured me of a good overclock I built the system with an AC
Freezer7 Pro but it wont overclock past 2.7GHz easy and 2.8GHz unstably.
I've tried everything but it will post but not boot even with all the set
optimally.
Would water-cooling be any help or a complete waste of time. I just
wanted 3GHz and spent the money to achieve it.

Robin

'Peter van der Goes' wrote, in part:
If you want help with overclocking in a forum such as this one, you need
to post complete details of all your hardware and all BIOS settings that
are not default.
_____

At least B^)

Phil Weldon


"Peter van der Goes" wrote in message
...
"Dumbo" wrote in message
...
I bought a RoG Striker Extreme and a pre-owned Q6600. The previous owner
assured me he had run it on air-cooling at 3.5GHz on a P5K mobo. Thinking
that this assured me of a good overclock I built the system with an AC
Freezer7 Pro but it wont overclock past 2.7GHz easy and 2.8GHz unstably.
I've tried everything but it will post but not boot even with all the set
optimally.
Would water-cooling be any help or a complete waste of time. I just
wanted 3GHz and spent the money to achieve it.

Robin

Inability to boot with given settings is unlikely to be a heat issue. IMO,
water cooling in your situation is throwing good money after bad.
There are no guarantees in overclocking. Just because the seller of your
used CPU claimed 3.5 GHz on air doesn't mean you will achieve the same,
even if you had the exact same hardware as the seller, which you don't.

If you wanted 3 GHZ guaranteed, you should have purchased a 3 GHz CPU.
If you want help with overclocking in a forum such as this one, you need
to post complete details of all your hardware and all BIOS settings that
are not default.

My mobo was a and new Asus RoG Striker Extreme (680i) based system with 4GB
of Corsair PC2 6400 DDR2 Ram, ATI HD2900XT vga card, onboard sound, OCX
memory cooler, Freezer 7 Pro cooler and Hitachi 500GB HDD. I have upped the
FSB several times and the system remains stable at standard voltages and the
Ram at 451 MHz but once I step it above 2.8 GHz it all goes belly up. I
have reduced the memory ratio and upped the memory voltage to 1.9V all with
no effect. Increasing the Vcore voltage has no effect either even with the
temps going through the roof. The last settings I tried were thus:

CPU Core 1.4125
cpu FSB 1.4
memory 1.9
SPP 1.45
MCP 1.525
HTT 1.35

but this posted once in a while and very definitely didn't boot.

I thought the whole point of Republic of Gamers motherboards was to
guarantee a substantial overclock above standard 680i motherboards. I know
it's very hit and miss but a B3 that ran at 3.5GHZ should surely run stably
on another mobo at a lower setting.

Robin

I live in Northern Ireland and room temps at this time of year are around
10-14C. My case is a Chieftec Large tower (6bay) with 2 front 80mm fans, 1
side mounted 80mm fan and 2 rear mounted exhaust fans. In my opinion
there's enough air flow to keep everything cool

"Dumbo" wrote in message
...
I bought a RoG Striker Extreme and a pre-owned Q6600. The previous owner
assured me he had run it on air-cooling at 3.5GHz on a P5K mobo. Thinking
that this assured me of a good overclock I built the system with an AC
Freezer7 Pro but it wont overclock past 2.7GHz easy and 2.8GHz unstably.
I've tried everything but it will post but not boot even with all the set
optimally.
Would water-cooling be any help or a complete waste of time. I just
wanted 3GHz and spent the money to achieve it.

Robin

Not a lot of info to go on, but I have the Striker Extreme and Q6600 in the
system I am using now. First of all.......Your memory should be set to it's
default speed or lower while you overclock the processor or you will be
chasing your own tail to get it stable. Once you get your processor to where
you want it, then you can work with the memory. Memory speeds are not as
critical as they used to be with the large, fast caches in the "Core"
processors. I use a Swiftech Quiet Power case with liquid cooling. It is a
rebadged Antec P180 with pump, reservoir, radiator and waterblock all built
into it along with the plumbing. I can run mine at 3.2Ghz very stable and
cool but it takes much more vcore voltage and I have to run my radiator and
intake fans at high speed and it is a bit noisy. I had an E6600 that would
go easily to 3.6Ghz but wound up putting that one into a system for my son.
It seems to me that the Q6600 doesn't respond as well to core voltage
increases as the E6600 did, even though temps are kept at a very acceptable
level. With your air cooling, if you keep the maximum temps at or below 60C
or so, you should be able to get at least 3.0Ghz out of it. What it does in
one MB does not automatically say it will do the same on another. One thing
about the Q6600 over the E6600 is the speed at which it will render large
video and audio files. It is a lot faster, even at a lower CPU speed. Your
software has to be able to support multi-core processors to see the
difference. As far as gaming is concerned, I would not rate one over the
other. The Q6600, even if I lower it to 3.0Ghz will run anything I do which
is mostly simulators like FSX and racing simulations like iRacing. Just
remember to set the memory to "Manual" and the rated speed or lower and see
what you can get from the processor first.

Ed

'Dumbo' wrote, in part:
I thought the whole point of Republic of Gamers motherboards was to
guarantee a substantial overclock above standard 680i motherboards. I
know it's very hit and miss but a B3 that ran at 3.5GHZ should surely run
stably
on another mobo at a lower setting.
_____

Well, as far as the ASUS Republic of Gamers Striker Extreme goes, there is
NO WAY a motherboard can guarantee a particular CPU will even overclock at
ALL. And, while overclocking is not rocket science, it does require a
modicum of knowledge, patience, and methodical approach. Given that, most
any 680i motherboard will give pretty much the same overclock with a
particular CPU. The most important item is the particular CPU, and that is
somewhat the luck of the draw.

Which brings up the question, did your particular CPU really run stably at
3.5 GHz, by what criteria, and how do you know for sure? And, if it did,
have you gone about overclocking the best way?

Comments:
1. Your CPU voltage is WAY too high for my comfort. Increasing the CPU
core voltage also increases the CPU operating temperature. While Intel CPUs
don't fail because of heat, raising the CPU core voltage too high can cause
immediate catastrophic failure.

2. It is nice to have such cool room temperatures if you are
overclocking; you get almost a degree for degree advantage in CPU
temperature from lower room temperatures IF the case ventilation is adequate
and the CPU cooler is adequate. (I'm just coming off a summer of 27 C room
temperatures.) Just adding fans doesn't guarantee adequate CPU cooling if
your CPU heatsink/fan is poorly installed, or if the case fans are poorly
installed. What you don't provide are the CPU temperatures at idle and
under heavy load. These are key diagnostics. Overclocking a CPU basically
requires trade-offs. Intel CPUs are manufactured to have extra stability
headroom so that the CPU will keep chugging along at the stock clock speed
even in poorly ventilated cases, hot room ambient temperature, poor voltage
regulation, corner-cutting motherboards, and other marginal components.
Overclocking trades this headroom for higher clock speeds, using better
components and better cooling. In addition, increasing the CPU core voltage
by a SMALL amount (10% or less, ideally) improves signal rise time and other
signal parameters.

3. Which brings us back to "And, while overclocking is not rocket
science, it does require a modicum of knowledge, patience, and methodical
approach." And your phrase "In my opinion..." You should go through the
posts to this newsgroup looking for other opinions, and, more important, the
results of "knowledge, patience, and methodical approach. Some of the
posters here have been overclocking for, oh, 15 years or so started with a
Celeron 300a, then went back and overclocked a Pentium 90, and now that I
think about it, even earlier I overclocked an Apple //e, but that was by
replacing the original CPU with a hybrid chip that included 8 KBytes of
cache (an overclock from 1 MHz to 8 MHz.) There are a few threads here with
680i in the subject line. Start there.

4. Here's what I would do.
a. Keep good written records of all the changes you make.
b. Immediately reduce your core voltage to about 0.05 volts BELOW
the stock voltage for your CPU, then set all the other BIOS parameters to
stock.
c. Find,download, and install a monitoring program that will
display and keep a log of CPU core temperatures as well as the motherboard
temperature (sometimes called the case temperature.) Use this to check the
installation of your CPU heatsink/fan.
d. Turn off all but one CPU core
e. Begin the overclocking process all over again, using small
increments and the methods described in this newsgroup
f. Avoid all 'automatic' or 'guru' overclocking functions of your
motherboard; likewise avoid all 'optimum settings.
g. At 2.8 GHz an Intel Core quad CPU is still very powerful, so
don't rush to higher speeds. With a slow, methodical approach and some
research you will learn a lot even if you don't reach the high goal you
expect.
h. Post more questions here as they come up, but show that you are
also looking for answers on your own. There are just too many small details
in overclocking for anyone to give you an exact procedure for your
particular system.

If all this seems too much, well, you can probably guess what's coming next.
Try another CPU, perhaps a Core 2 45 nm process (are you really using all
four cores?)

It's good you posted the voltages, buy how about the clock settings, memory
timing settings, bus speeds, and CPU Clock : Memory Clock ratios and
synchronization type.

Phil Weldon

I tried the advice here. I reduced the vcore to below auto and then
installed 1303 BIOS instead of 1305 and everything responded very well. The
system never refused to POST. 1333 (3.0 GHz) was easily attained and only a
little tinkering with the voltage brought it up to a stable 3.0GHz at
1.2656V. All is well for now. I always thought the latest BIOS
would/should be the best but not here. Due to it being so handy I may well
try over the Xmas period to push it a bit more.

Thanks everyone for your input.

Have a good holiday.

Robin