After several days of testing and trial and error, I’ve found the sweet spot for my Q6600. It was a fairly impressive overclocker, with its overclocked performance easily beating to pulp Intel’s high-end CPU to date, the Core2Quad Extreme Edition QX6850 (obviously, not overclocked )

If you can make sense of the graph above, basically it shows various benchmark results (Sisoft Sandra 2007 and FutureMark PCMark05). Performance increase was gradual, apart from 2 glitches, one in memory at test #4, and one in PCMark05 in test #10. The blank lines are because I did not have the patience to run the test each time I increased the FSB, because it takes around 25minutes to run all tests. So, 14 tests x 25 minutes would result in almost 7 overclocking hours! Anyway, total overclock performance resulted in a theoretical performance increase of 42%, a real-world performance increase of 23%, and a clock speed increase of 47% (from 2.4Ghz to 3.515Ghz).

I could manage to get it higher, by continuing to increase the CPU’s vCore voltage however, to increase it to a clock speed of 3.6Ghz, it required a 0.1v increase (mind you, 0.1v is quite an increase for the little CPU, considering you can increment in 0.0125v intervals), which resulted in a 5 deg C increase in core temperature. Currently it’s idling at around 45 degC, and a 62 deg C under load, and it would have resulted in an idling temperature of around 50deg C, which is quite high for an idle CPU, and might decrease it’s lifetime (Although until it will end its “normal” lifespan, I should be well underway with a new computer build, maybe with 64-cores ). So, I opted to stay at the 380Mhz FSB limit, and am quite content with the results. Now, I’ll just to try to see the minimum vCore voltage that it will work stable with, and leave it like that. And it’ll live happily ever after

I have just upgraded the computer that I work with to a great rig – A Quad-Core CPU, Intel Core2Quad Q6600 that works brilliantly. It’s also the latest version, sporting the G0 stepping, which is much more efficient and thermal-efficient than the previous B3 stepping. Very suitable for running many applications at once, and for its great speeds. Also, will soon be overclocking it to its max (on air), to get the most juice out of it. They’re renowned to be great overclockers… Let’s see if they live up to their name! Apart from that, my computer consists of:

• Asus P5K-E/WiFi-AP P35 Motherboard
• Intel Core2Quad Q6600
• 2x 1GB Mushkin Enhanced PC2-8500 (5-5-4-12)
• 2x 500 GB Seagate SATA2 16MB cache Hard Disks, in Raid 0 (stripe) setup
• 2x 250 GB Maxtor SATA2 8MB cache Hard Disks, in Raid 1 (mirror) setup
• 1x 500 GB Seagate SATA2 16MB cache Hard Disk
• 1x LG DVD-RW 18x
• Gainward nVidia GeForce 7300LE (was a 7600GT, that failed and is currently in process of being RMAed)

Will update once I’ve finished overclocking, and it is stable, and let you know my results!