Blameless

Cool. Looks like there is not a whole lot of difference in the voltages it takes for our chips to reach similar stable clocks. Just seems that your board is hitting a wall a bit sooner.

That vdroop is pretty bad, could be due to your board only supporting a 4-pin ATX connector.

The Vector Kid

All the more reason to upgrade

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redalert

well my vid is 1.225 BIOS vcore is set to 1.25
Batch #L813B168 I never tried to go higher than 3.4 I didnt adjust any other voltages. The only changed I made was to the memory it was @ 4-5-5-15 @850 now its at 1020 @ 5-5-5-15

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The Vector Kid

In terms of CPU-Z's readings it looks like ours are almost the same, yours comes out a little under. It just goes to show you how vDroop can really up an overclock.

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alex0826

Hey, there, I'm trying to get some advise/help on overclocking my new Q9450 build. Not sure that this is the right place to post this, but here goes... This is my setup.

Q9450 "would like to get it to between 3-4 Ghz"

OCZ Vanquisher CPU cooler "great price, around $10"

MSI P7N Diamond "liked it on paper, but now that I have this board I don't like it as much"

8 GIG's of OCZ SLI ddr2-800 "would like to over clock to 1Ghz"

4 SATA 2 Barracuda 500 GIG, 7200.11 drives in a zero array, "runs good"

Nvidia 9800 GX2 "great video card, can't even see anyone needing 2, (yet)"

OCZ 600 watt Stealth Stream PS "actually bought 2 since the price was great!, wanted to be ready for 2nd GX2 down the road when they are cheap, and would probably have to get the Antec 900+1200 dual power supply case but without the PS, just the empty case & drop these 2 600's in there, but thats at least a year down the road"

Sony DL-DVD drive.

Ninja 2 mid tower, "friend says this is a bit tight for this build" Yeah, I know, I need a bigger case, but that will be a year or so b4 I wind up dumping any more $ into this setup...

It runs good, some minor glitches now and then, I've read that this chipset has some problems. just finished Bio Shock, loved it. I had all the settings maxed out and I could move faster then I really wanted to in the game. Sometimes I would get motion sickness and would have to give it a rest for a day or so, LOL. It ran without any slow downs, and that was with Utorrent and a bunch of other stuff running in the background, virus blocker, trillian, etc... Of course my friend says to me "WHY?!" do I need to overclock this as great as it is right now. Honestly, I see everyone on these message boards, hitting crazy results on air. I would like to be able to see the improvements and have the bragging rights as well... getting an extra ghz out of this CPU would show a difference I'm sure...

The only draw back with this build that I can see so far is that 3 of the 4 drives are mounted too close to each other. The video card splits the 4th drive away from the rest, and it does run a little cooler I've noticed. The three drives do have an inlet case fan right in front of them, and I assume that does help. The space between each of the 3 drives is less then a 1/2 inch and I know this isn't the best thing to do, but the only other thing I can and may do is scrap the floppy and pop a drive in there to fix the cooling issue, so far I haven't noticed any drives failing...

Sorry for the long post...
Anyway, this is it, can anyone help me OC this to a safe level and not croak anything...