Well, it’s that time again, where I bore you all with tales of my semi-competent overclocking. This time it’s time for Intel’s latest chipset, P35. This thread is locked, and any comments etc should go in this thread.
The rig is:
Intel Q6600 Core 2 Duo Quad, low power edition, G0 stepping.
Thermalright Ultra 120A cooler with 120mm 55cfm fan
Asus P5K-E WiFi AP motherboard
2 x 1GB OCZ PC2 1066 DDR RAM
BFG nVidia 8800GTX
2 x Maxtor DiamondMax20 80GB SATA HDDs in RAID 0
1x Maxtor DiamondMax20 80GB SATA HDD for data
2 x Samsung Writemaster SATA DVD-RW
On-board sound
Antec Nine Hundred case
Antec TruePower Trio 650W PSU
Windows PX Pro SP2, fully updated.
Benchmarks used:
CPU-Z v 1.41 for speeds
3DMark03, 05 and 06
SuperPI 1.5
ScienceMark 2
SiSoft Sandra Arithmetic, Multimedia and Memory Bandwidth benchmarks.
Stability testing with the above plus Orthos and the ever-popular TES IV: Oblivion.
Temperature monitoring is with Asus Probe.
9 October 07
Most of the settings for this board can be found under “Advanced” -> “Jumper Free”. Most things are set to Auto by default, so many have been left like that. In the cases where I have changed things a certain degree of guesswork has been involved as to what to set initially.
Those initial settings are:
AI Overclocking, CPU Ration control and DRAM Timing Control all set to Manual to unlock the various overclocking options.
CPU Ratio = 9
FSB Strap to Northbridge = Auto
FSB Freq = 266
PCI-E Freq = 100
DRAM Freq = 1067
Command Rate = 2T
CAS = 5
RAS -> CAS = 5
RAS Precharge = 5
RAS -> Active = 15
That is, RAM main timings are 2T, 5-5-5-15
RAS->RAS delay = 10
Row Refresh Cycle = 25
Write Recovery, Write to Read Delay, Read to Precharge, DRAM Static Read Control all = Auto
Transaction Booster = Disabled
Clock Overcharging Mode = Auto
CPU and PCI=E Spread Spectrum = Disabled
Under “CPU Configuration”, everything (such as C1E Support etc) is disabled.
CPU voltage = 1.2500
CPU Voltage Reference = Auto
CPU Voltage Damper = Enabled
CPU PLU Voltage = 1.6
DRAM Voltage = 2.00
FSB Term Voltage = 1.30V
Northbridge Voltage = 1.40V
Northbridge Voltage Reference = Auto
Southbridge Voltage = 1.05V
Where I have a rough idea what something does, I’ve set a value. The CPU and RAM voltages are roughly right (and if I set the RAM any higher Asus Probe doesn’t load properly – a sure sign of RAM instability. Other voltages are basically one notch above the lowest selectable. The RAM timings are ones I know work, as this is the RAM I was using in my Asus P5N32-E SLI until it started acting up (but the problem is the motherboard itself).
As usual, I ran a set of benchmarks to show baseline performance and to check stability. I also ran Oblivion for a couple of hours to test basic stability – still the most reliable test I know. Here are the initial benchmarks:
3DMark03 = 38958
3DMark05 =15551
3DMark06 = 12063
SuperPI (4M) = 1:51.938
ScienceMark = 1397.42
Sandra Arithmetic = 44707/30634
Sandra Multi-Media = 264715/143282
Sandra Memory Bandwidth = 5683/5695
Now, time to play…