Opted for the q6700...

gandlers · #1 01-09-2008, 19:21

Following my questions in a previous post I bought a Q6700 at the weekend. I also grabbed a pair of the same memory sticks I had form my mate who just bought some 4gb (2x2gb) dominator 8500 memory.
I dropped the cpu in sticking with my original 2 sticks of memory and by upping the voltages and fsb have got 3.17Ghz from the chip with the mem at 793mhz.
Now comparing my bios to my mates it appears that it was my Mobo that was causing my lack of over-clockabilty on my P5B/e6600 combo. My mobo is rev 1.03g and his is a 1.04g. The difference is he gets NB, SB and ICH voltage options in bios which I dont. I guess there is no way of getting these options in my bios as they are enabled in some different hardware between our revisions of board.
But I am pleased with that as an overclock for now, new mobo and a water cooling setup are on my shopping list.

I tried using the 2 other ram sticks to give me 4gb and have discovered the minefield of 4 sick memory configurations... I found some heavy threads on houseofhelp.com notably Thread one and Thread two and now I have some questions...

So using all four assuming i enable memory remap and set /pae in boot ini of win xp the most i can hope to get is ~3gb of memory rated at ddr800 running at ddr667 with maybe a slight overclock but I'd have to use 1066 memory to get 4 one gigs running at 800 (upto ~1000 depending on overclocking ability of board).
So which is better for overclocking? 2x2gb or 4x1gb im confused as to why people would use 4 sticks if they dont run as fast as 2 sticks.
When I get a new motherboard (after spending up on my Q6700) in a few months, am I better sticking with just 2x1gb pc6400, would it be worth struggling to get all four sticks working (i already have the other 2!) or is there no memory bandwidth improvement using all four slots?
Do I need to save up for 2x2gb sticks (probably pc8500)?

I think i just need a pointer for the penny to drop, i hope anyway!

G

Clunk · #2 01-09-2008, 20:21

I think you would probably be better off selling the P5B and getting something more up to date. As good as the P5B was, it's starting to show it's age with some memory configs now and you can probably pick up a fairly cheap P35 board for the price of a set of 2x2GB memory.

GSte · #3 02-09-2008, 00:41

I had exactly that issue with my P5B deluxe, shame really as it hit decent FSBs...... as Clunk says, would be best to ditch it and get a P35 or even a P45 as they aren't much more.

gandlers · #4 02-09-2008, 09:12

well, 3.2g will do for the time being until I get my grubby mitts on a beter mobo. I'm thinking of a P5Q model at the moment as I cant justify the extra money on the RoG boards from asus.

G

affiliate13 · #5 02-09-2008, 10:22

Quote:

Originally Posted by gandlers

well, 3.2g will do for the time being until I get my grubby mitts on a beter mobo. I'm thinking of a P5Q model at the moment as I cant justify the extra money on the RoG boards from asus.

G

There is not too much to complain about with the P5Q, but its real hard to top the DFI X48 selection at the moment too.
The best thing about them is the almost endless resources you will find here in the reviews section.

I dont think you would be disapointed with either though.

gandlers · #6 17-09-2008, 15:57

well, we have an update. My mate owed me some money and asked me what i fancied from scan as repayment; so he went and bought 2 Lanparty LT X48-T2R's although only one of them was for me

After a bit of head scratching I managed to get the NB heatsink and the AC Freezer7 all in and connected. I've had to rotate the CPU heatsink so the fan is on the bottom pulling air over the heat minator on the NB and blowing through into the intake of the PSU fan. I didn't fancy chopping into either the NB heatsink or the CPU heatsking to make them fit as intended. Anyone see a problem with this setup or is it ok for 3 months until i save for the watercooling kit?

My question is regarding the memory, I have 4 stick of corsair CM2X1024-6400C4 which i have strapped to 4-4-4-12 @ 2.1V as per the specs for the Memory. With all the bios on default (auto) the memory is clocking in as ddr667. I tried to change the dram timing to 266/400 to get the memory running at ddr800 but OCCT bugged out. It has me thinking about the initial post and the link off to the corsair (asktheramguy/houseofhelp) messages.

Can someone in the know give me a pointer as to what kind of fun I will have with 4 sticks, am I better just dumping 2 of them? Is there anyone with experience of this memory setup?

G

affiliate13 · #7 17-09-2008, 16:04

Quote:

Originally Posted by gandlers

well, we have an update. My mate owed me some money and asked me what i fancied from scan as repayment; so he went and bought 2 Lanparty LT X48-T2R's although only one of them was for me

After a bit of head scratching I managed to get the NB heatsink and the AC Freezer7 all in and connected. I've had to rotate the CPU heatsink so the fan is on the bottom pulling air over the heat minator on the NB and blowing through into the intake of the PSU fan. I didn't fancy chopping into either the NB heatsink or the CPU heatsking to make them fit as intended. Anyone see a problem with this setup or is it ok for 3 months until i save for the watercooling kit?

My question is regarding the memory, I have 4 stick of corsair CM2X1024-6400C4 which i have strapped to 4-4-4-12 @ 2.1V as per the specs for the Memory. With all the bios on default (auto) the memory is clocking in as ddr667. I tried to change the dram timing to 266/400 to get the memory running at ddr800 but OCCT bugged out. It has me thinking about the initial post and the link off to the corsair (asktheramguy/houseofhelp) messages.

Can someone in the know give me a pointer as to what kind of fun I will have with 4 sticks, am I better just dumping 2 of them? Is there anyone with experience of this memory setup?

G

Just change the strap in the genie bios section, try 333/667 first for any overclocking then you can increase the FSB and see the ram frequency rise too you may need more NB voltage with 4 sticks i havent tried more than two in mine. When you reach your max CPU overclock you can play with the strap to run the RAM faster.

gandlers · #8 17-09-2008, 22:37

Just running some stability tests, but i think that we may have a stable 3.3Ghz CPU overclock with all 4 memory sticks running at DDR800....happy days.

Baby steps form here to see if we can squeeze some more out of the memory.....
I guess I'm right to assume that it's easier to overclock 2 1gig sticks of memory as opposed to 4 1gig sticks, so I will get limited gains with 4gigs???

Is it there much benefit to XP having 4gig (3.25 after windows limited addressing), does the extra memory really speed anything up other than reducing pagefile usage with lots of apps open.

G

GSte · #9 17-09-2008, 22:56

With XP there isn't much benefit IMO no, though for Vista I'd say yes, it does feel like it takes a little of the sluggishness out of it....

You will achieve higher overclocks with 2 sticks of RAM as you rightly say, if you loosen the timings to 5-5-5-15 it will let you overclock it further obviously.

gandlers · #10 18-09-2008, 16:03

affiliate,

just looked at your specs, does that heatskink fit correctly with the Minator on the NB? Scan have them for a little over 20 quid so if it fits I may get one to replace the freezer 7 which I guess isnt as good as the TT120 vendetta2 or the s1283.

are there any pics of it installed in your pc.

Has anyone strapped a fan to the minator yet? If I had a 60mm fan knocking around Id strap one on just to see if it works, but I guess I've already got that going on with the cpu fan sucking air over it. I'd rather get the airflow over the cpu cooler back to the "front to back" layout rather than "bottom to top" which it is using at the moment.

G