crocket

Hi,

First off I would like to thank many of the forum members here, I have been able to gather quite a lot of info for overclocking my rig by reading other peoples posts. Also, if I should be posting in a different spot please let me know, I am unfamiliar with these forums.

I know I may be a little behind the times with my hardware, but I got an awesome price on some of the components and this is my first new build from scratch (I threw together an old P4 rig from junk parts a little while back). So this is what I have:

EVGA 680i Motherboard (A1 series, P31 bios)
Core 2 Quad Q6600 G0
Arctic Freezer 7 Pro rev. 2 Heatsink
G. Skill 2 x 2 GB 1066 DDR2 RAM
2 x PNY 8800GT 512MB in SLI
850W OCZ GameXStream Power Supply
Windows 7 Ultimate (64bit - received from hosting Win. 7 party )

I believe that is all that is necessary, if you need more details on what hardware I have let me know.

So, through my research here at overclock.net and at the EVGA forums I think I have turned off all of the unnecessary features such as Speedstep and Spread Spectrum (if someone could list all the features to turn off that would be appreciated). Then I set it up CPU/RAM to be Linked and Synced. I ran some prime95 and OCCT before starting to overclock just to see what temps I would be reaching and such. After everything looked good I went and started increasing the FSB incrementally from 2.4 GHz to 2.5 GHz to 2.6 GHz and so on, each time running OCCT for 1 hr for stability testing. I have gotten all the way up to 3.0 GHz (1334 for FSB speed) and it runs fine, as soon as I increase it to 1378 to try to reach 3.1 GHz my motherboard automatically drops my multiplier from 9 to 6. In the POST screen when booting it says the multiplier is at 9, when I right click on Computer and check the speed of the processor it says 3.1 GHz, but when I open up CPU-Z or run OCCT to test stability, both say I am at 344.5 * 6 = 2.0 GHz. Underclock for the phail.

Anyways, I was wondering what steps I should take from here. Should I keep pushing it higher anyways, should I mess with other settings in BIOS like voltages (which I think are all auto right now, runs around 1.37 to 1.44 I believe, would need to double check for accuracy). I have not performed the "pencil mod" either yet.

Thats all the relevant info I can think of right now...what do you guys think? Thanks again for your help!

TwoCables

Hey, Crocket! Welcome to Overclock.net I hope that I can provide a little bit of help here since I have the same motherboard.

So, to begin with, here's the list of things that should be disabled:

• Spread Spectrum (mine only allows me to adjust the PCIe Spread Spectrum (SPP), and so I can only disable that one. So disable as many as you can).
• Intel Speedstep
• CPU Thermal Control
• C1E Enhanced Halt State
• You can even disable Virtualization Technology if you know you'll never use a Virtual Machine.

You should also go through every last inch of the BIOS to find and disable anything you're not using. For example, I'm not using the onboard Serial and USB headers for the front panel on my case, so I have them disabled. I'm also not using the eSATA, so that's disabled too. The same thing goes for the things that mention the floppy drive, such as the FDC.

Disabling anything and everything that you're not using frees up system resources which might translate to allowing you to get a slightly higher overclock than you otherwise would by leaving all of those things enabled. I even disabled all of the mentions of IDE in my BIOS since I'm using 100% SATA. hehe I'm obsessed with streamlining my system.
I've actually found that using Unlinked makes overclocking much easier for me. After all, I don't have to worry about my FSB clock adjustments messing with my memory clock. Not only that, but it's the nForce chipset: the 1:1 ratio thing isn't as important as it is with Intel branded chipsets because of the fact we have this Unlinked feature. And this Unlinked feature essentially unlocks a large amount of invisible ratios. Like, with my overclock, the FSB:DRAM ratio ended up being 10:9. That's just one of the invisible ratios.
I quoted all of the above to basically say one thing: for all of the voltages, except maybe for the HT nForce SPP <-> MCP, switch them to Manual instead of Auto. But it's ok for the HT nForce SPP <-> MCP voltage to remain on Auto.

After that, begin with setting the FSB to 1.4V. 1.5V is the highest available setting here, but you'll probably never use it (and I've been told it's not a good idea to use it unless it's absolutely, positively necessary, and also not unless it's recommended).

As for the Northbridge (SPP) voltage, I suppose 1.3 or 1.4V would be good.

For the Southbridge voltage, I suppose 1.60V would be good. 1.50V is most likely the voltage it's using on Auto, but it doesn't hurt to increase it a little bit.

And last but not least, I'll go back up to the vcore: for this overclock, 1.40V to 1.45V should be plenty, so that's why I'm thinking that the FSB voltage and NB voltages should be increased. This might help to stabilize it just enough to continue tweaking the overclock. And also using Unlinked for the Memory Clock Mode might help too.

And finally: keep in mind that it's been found that the Q6600 and the 680i chipset don't get along very well, so try to avoid expecting anything past 3.0 GHz. This way, if you do get past 3.0 GHz, every little increase will be sweet!

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crocket

Thanks for your response. I will go with that and see how far I get and give an update when I'm done.