Reliable E6400 O/C with good ram & stock cooling?

Sugarcane

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Jun 11, 2005
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This is what I'm working with:

E6400 w/ stock fan
Gigabyte 965p-DS3
2x512 ddr2-800 corsair Newegg link

I need the system to be rock solid stable for at least a year or 2. I'm reading that people are getting their e6400's to 3.5ghz+, along with a comment about some fancy water cooling or after market cpu fan etc. My case has the typical front and rear 120mm fans, and a power supply fan pushing out the back as well. Stock cooling for now.

What can I reasonably expect to hope for here? Thanks.
 

redwing

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Apr 21, 2004
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Everything's highly dependent on how good of an airflow you have in your case, whether you have any "hotspots" where hot air gets trapped, whether your air circulation from front -> back is not blocked by bad wiring, etc .... lots of factors.

You have one of the better MBs for the job, so in terms of stability you probably don't have anything to worry about it. I would say that a 333Mhz FSB (likely at stock Vcore and northbridge voltages) is a fairly safe OC level for you, using the stock HSF.
That would give you a 333/266*2.13 = 2.66Ghz CPU speed, or in other words an E6700 (minus the 4Mb cache size ... but that doesn't seem to have a hugh performance impact from the benchmarks I've seen).

I've only OC'd core2s for 2 friends of mine, and personally I do not have a Core2 system. However, I'm confident that if you stick at those levels, you have nothing to worry about (on stock cooling). You can likely go much higher on stock, but that would involve higher voltages -> higher temp and higher wattage, might compromise stability unless you get some better cooling. Good case airflow is also essential to keep the MB cool.

Cheers and GL

edit : In your situation, considering you ahve 800Mhz ram, the ideal (in my opinion) setup would be to have your FSB at 400Mhz (effectively 1600), which would allow you to run your ram at "full speed". So far the word on the street is that a Core2 performs best when the memory speed is synced (1:1 or 1:2 of FSB), not when there's some weird 9:13 divider setting. More so than with older pentium Ds.
Running your FSB at 400Mhz, however, would certainly require some form of decent aftermarket HSF. Scythe, Thermaltake, Tuniq all make excellent coolers, priced around 50$ (give or take 10$). Considering the performance you gain from running your CPU at higher speeds, as well as the fact that a good aftermarket cooler is less noisy (even if it's much more peformant) than a stock Intel cooler at full speed, the tradeoff is usually worth it. Will require some good research on your end tho :)
 
What temps do you get Apache? Thx.

im disappointed with the TT Typhoon, im getting 58+*c under load (TAT), iv lapped the base and cpu and polished em both and used AS5 (replaced it and reseated it twice) and get the same results

It seems my ASUS might read temps off a little?

Case: TT Soprano
 

plankmeister

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Sep 7, 2006
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It sounds like you know what you're doing... but still... gotta ask... You're not drowning it in AS5 are you? What method are you using? The "grain of rice" method, or the "credit card & patience" method?
 
It sounds like you know what you're doing... but still... gotta ask... You're not drowning it in AS5 are you? What method are you using? The "grain of rice" method, or the "credit card & patience" method?

at first i did the minimal/credit card wipe and i thought maybe it was an uneven surface and didnt contact fully (it did cause it had marks of the cpu on the base of the hsf etc), so i poped it off and put a glob in the centre to let its self work in and no diffrence in temps, all i know is its below 65*c TAT temps and its rock solid :D

my asus must read the temps a little hot

oh, 1.35v vcore, vdroop takes it back to 1.2-something
 

BustedSony

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Apr 24, 2006
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This is what I'm working with:

E6400 w/ stock fan
Gigabyte 965p-DS3
2x512 ddr2-800 corsair Newegg link

I need the system to be rock solid stable for at least a year or 2. I'm reading that people are getting their e6400's to 3.5ghz+, along with a comment about some fancy water cooling or after market cpu fan etc. My case has the typical front and rear 120mm fans, and a power supply fan pushing out the back as well. Stock cooling for now.

What can I reasonably expect to hope for here? Thanks.

I'm running Folding@Home 24/7 on an E6400 at 3.2 Ghz. The clock is 400, the memory 800 or 1:1, and of course the FSB is 1600 Mhz. The cooler is an Arctic Cooling Pro 7, the Motherboard a P5W-DH which is not as good for overclocking as your 965-based board. The voltage for the CPU was upped slightly to 1.475 (from stock 1.39) everything else is stock voltages, and it runs quite cool in a P180.
 

jlf2n

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Dec 28, 2006
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Hey, I to have a E6400 on a p5n32 se deluxe mobo and last night was my real 1st attempt of ever OC'ing anything. After the help I recieved on my thread, I OC'd my Kingston 533 512mb ram from 4-4-4-12 up to 600 with a 5-5-5-15. Ran a memtest85+, then moved to the Processor. After OC'ing it to 2.4, my cpu actually ran 3-4c cooler than it was @ 2.13. So tonight Im gonna take it to 2.6 and see what happens. But if the temp is any indication, I may get more life from it by OCing it :)

The only voltage i changed was to my mem, and that was by a min amount.
 

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