TR Forums

PainIs4ThaWeak1 wrote:

That's too bad you're stuck with 800Mhz RAM.

As others have said, the E8400 is perfectly capable of a 450x9 FSB-to-Multiplier - Been running mine that way for nearly two years.

I think he can actually overclock further despite only having DDR800. I have an E8400 and almost the same board (ASUS P5Q SE PLUS, the cheap version basically), and I can set my DDR1066 down to around 850mhz, even with my FSB at 440mhz. In other words, this board has a lot of dividers to work with.

Not that 600mhz of free performance is bad, but 1000mhz is better.

Coran Fixx wrote:

Thats what makes the 3.6 the sweet spot. I ran my e8400 at 3.6 for Years without a voltage bump, the auto memory setting making my ram run at its rated 800mhz. I actually up to 4.2 but needed alot of voltage to be happy there. I was using 4 x 2gb of corsair value ram. I don't recall having to set the memory to 667 first, but I had an evga board and not an ASUS. I have never lost a os install to a overaggressive overclock. Just had to clear the cmos a few times (either a jumper setting or remove the mb button battery).

I've had pretty much the same experience with my E8400, although I settled on around 4ghz as a reasonable overclock. I got it up to 4.3ghz stable in IBT/P95, but that required a LOT more voltage (and produced much more heat) than 4ghz. I've never lost an OS install to anything other than a HDD crash, and have overclocked almost every computer I've owned. I'm not saying it's impossible, but I think the risk is pretty small.

Starfalcon wrote:

Most C2 quads have very little OCing headroom in them.

Oh? My Intel® Core™2 Quad Processor Q9300 effortlessly overclocked by 20%. 30% or more required a voltage bump.

JustAnEngineer wrote:

My Intel® Core™2 Quad Processor Q9300 effortlessly overclocked by 20%. 30% or more required a voltage bump.

I concur, minor work got my Q6600 from 2.4 to 3.4 with a Xigmatek 1283, P5K-Deluxe and some Mushkin DDR2 1066. The Quads overclocked, not to 4+ Ghz but they still deserve some credit.

Compared to the core duos, they tend not to go as high, and obviously newer quads will run much better than older ones. Buying a quad and hoping to get a 1 Ghz OC out of is silly though, not every chip will clock as well as the ones people post about. I had an XP 2500 back in the day of people getting massive OCs out of them, mine wouldn't run over stock at all without massive voltage increases. If I had bought it hoping for a huge OC I would have been massively disappointed. Never buy a cpu or gpu with the huge hopes of OCing it to massive numbers, it can happen but don't expect it.

JustAnEngineer wrote:

Starfalcon wrote:

Most C2 quads have very little OCing headroom in them.

Oh? My Intel® Core™2 Quad Processor Q9300 effortlessly overclocked by 20%. 30% or more required a voltage bump.

Mine got to around 3.15 no problem, 3.2 required a pretty substantial voltage boost that my Scythe Ninja couldn't really keep up with (80c under load is not cool)