Hey Garry423, I have been running a Q8400 overclocked to 3.57GHz and find it stable on a
similar cooler. I'm a newbie to this a swell, and have had good luck with Gigabyte's Easy Tune6 by clicking the big shiny overclock buttons in the past. I have an EP45-UD3P and Corsair PC2-6400 (800) RAM.
The Q8400 has an 8x multiplier (it's hard coded into the cpu, listed as CPU Clock Ratio in the bios), so you take that and multiply it by your CPU Host Frequency/bus speed (333) and you get 2.66GHz. Since the CPU multiplier can't go any higher, we have to increase the Host Frequency setting which increases the speed of other stuff on the mobo like RAM as well. I have mine set to 447, it can go higher but then the fan is audible and I don't want that, 8 x 447 = 3.57GHz. It seems you need to bump up the CPU voltage, but I've actually put mine lower to lower the temps, and it seems stable at 1.21875 volts.
Intel lists the max voltage as 1.3625V, and temp as 71.4c so don't go over that.
Since you have a dual bios like me, if the system does crash it just reloads the bios with the last settings so it's pretty easy to tinker with this stuff. You can use Easy Tune6 to easily set the overclock, or do the fine tuning in the bios. Once you set the overclock, check system stability with prime95 and keep an eye on the temps. Mine stays under 60c at full load which seems to be what people recommend. I just kept bumping up the bus speed, stress tested. If it crashes (within a matter of minutes) bump up the voltage a few ticks or the bus speed down. I used maximum power consumption test in prime95. When you're happy, run Blend tests with SUM(INPUTS) error and Round off checking options enabled for 24 hours and you should be stable.
There's some other processors that can be found cheap like Q9550 with an 8.5x multiplier. Since your bus will only go so fast before it crashes, a CPU with a higher multiplier will get you higher speeds. My next project is to get a Xeon X5460 or X5470 (9.5x and 10x multipliers), you have to mod the bios and cpu socket to make it work. Unfortunately the CPU fan seems to blow directly out the back, and does not blow towards the motherboard cooling the RAM. I was looking at a new fan that could cool the other parts of the motherboard as well
like this but that's money better spent on newer computer.
TL;DR Here's my changes in MB Intelligent Tweaker
* Clock Chip Control *
CPU Host Clock Control Enabled
CPU Host Frequency (Mhz) 447
C.I.A. 2 Disabled
* DRAM Performance Control *
Performance Enhance Standard
System Memory Multiplier 2.00D
* Mother Board Voltage Control *
Load-Line Calibration Disabled
CPU Vcore 1.21875
DRAM Voltage 1.820V
Also disable energy saving features in Advanced BIOS Features C1E, C2E, C4E, TM2, EIST while overclocking. I re-enabled them after I was happy to save some energy and haven't had any problems.
If you ever installed Dynamic Energy Saver, I recommend turning it off before uninstalling it. I installed it so I could have my fancy power LEDs on the board, and it has given me terrible DPC latency ever since. Even after uninstalling it, even after bios upgrades and resetting, it still killed my DPC latency. To disable it, I had to install it, click the button to turn it off (immediately solved DPC latency), then uninstalled it.
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