Safely Overclocking Q6600 quad-core

[Renat Zarbailov]

What is the safe ground clock level/cache and all that stuff to overclock and Intel Q6600 quad-core processor in motherboard bios Asus P5KPremium (Black pearl edition). I have never attempted to overclock any of my workstations before so I am completely new to this.
Has anyone, having the Q6600, achieved the golden spot practical level of overclocking if the NLE of choice is Premiere Pro CS3 starting to use Sony Vegas Pro 8b.

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks

[John DeLuca]

I have a similar board from Asus. Have you tried auto clocking (It automatically overclocks when under load). Checkoout the ‘overclock forums’. Other people are claiming 3.GHZ with air-cooling and 3.2GHZ+ with liquid.

-John

[Renat Zarbailov]

Thanks John!
What clockspeed are you on?
Ever had hangs or abrupt shut downs?

Thanks

Originally Posted by John DeLuca

I have a similar board from Asus. Have you tried auto clocking (It automatically overclocks when under load). Checkoout the ‘overclock forums’. Other people are claiming 3.GHZ with air-cooling and 3.2GHZ+ with liquid.

-John

[John DeLuca]

Renat-

I use the ‘auto clock’, plus I think the motherboard does an automatic 10 percent overclock out of the box. I edit 10-bit, 2K Cineform Raw AVI files with PPCS3, Cineform Prospect 2K, and Iridas Speed Grade On-Set (running Windows XP with 3GB switch). It’s never crashed/hung up, even during long renders or compression runs. This should give you an idea of my cooling setup-

Air Cooling-

-Antec P190 Case has two 140mm fans mounted right above the mother board, two 120mm fans low/rear, and one massive 200mm big boy blowing cold air on the entire mother board.

-Massive copper heatsink with heat pipes and large side mounted fan for the CPU.

IMO you don’t really need liquid cooling with a set up like this. The fans have large blades with a very aggressive blade pitch that moves a lot of air at low RPM’s.

-John

[Andrew Davies]

Can you clarify by what you mean by "3Gb" switch for XP please?

Andy Davies

[John DeLuca]

Andrew-

This should explain it-

"Recent versions of Windows support a switch option in BOOT.INI called the /3GB switch, which adjusts the way memory is allocated between the user and the operating system. By default, the split is fifty-fifty -- up to two gigabytes for the user and two for the operating system. The /3GB switch option sets those limits at three gigs maximum for the user and one gig for the operating system.

As the name implies, /3GB was originally meant to be used in systems that have 3 GB or more of RAM -- something that is no longer quite as rare as it used to be! However, even if you don't have 3 GB or more of memory, you can still use the /3GB switch successfully if you are running memory-hungry desktop applications. Photoshop, for instance, is infamous for staking out as much RAM as it can. With /3GB enabled, there's that much more memory that the application can use.

I've written previously about using the /3GB switch in both Windows 2000 Server and Windows 2003 Server environments to bolster performance of memory-intensive services such as Exchange Server and SQL Server. But, in a desktop environment, you should consider any use of /3GB to be provisional until you determine that the application set you're using plays nicely with it. (My usual rule of thumb for seeing if something holds up under stress is to try it for two weeks under varied conditions; if it doesn't crash, it's probably okay.)

1.) To add the /3GB switch as a separate boot option:


2.) In My Computer | Properties | Advanced | Startup and Recovery, click Settings.

Click the Edit button under System Startup to edit the BOOT.INI file.

3.) Find the current boot entry, which typically looks like this:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect

4.) Copy this line and paste it at the end of the BOOT.INI file, and change it along these lines:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional 3GB Switch" /fastdetect /3GB
This lets you choose between a conventional boot entry and the /3GB boot entry. If something goes wrong when you use /3GB, you can always boot back into the original configuration.


5.) Save and close BOOT.INI.

6.) Click OK to close the Startup and Recovery panel.

7.) Click Settings again, and in the "Default operating systems:" dropdown, choose the newly created boot entry with the /3GB switch.

8.) Click OK to close everything. Reboot into the new profile. "


Renat-

Just to clarify, the ‘auto clock’ hovers just below 3ghz when under load.

-John

[Renat Zarbailov]

Originally Posted by John DeLuca

Renat-

I use the ‘auto clock’, plus I think the motherboard does an automatic 10 percent overclock out of the box. I edit 10-bit, 2K Cineform Raw AVI files with PPCS3, Cineform Prospect 2K, and Iridas Speed Grade On-Set (running Windows XP with 3GB switch). It’s never crashed/hung up, even during long renders or compression runs. This should give you an idea of my cooling setup-

Air Cooling-

-Antec P190 Case has two 140mm fans mounted right above the mother board, two 120mm fans low/rear, and one massive 200mm big boy blowing cold air on the entire mother board.

-Massive copper heatsink with heat pipes and large side mounted fan for the CPU.

IMO you don’t really need liquid cooling with a set up like this. The fans have large blades with a very aggressive blade pitch that moves a lot of air at low RPM’s.

-John

Thanks John!
The ‘auto clock’ is set in bios or in Windows?

[John DeLuca]

Renat-

You can over clock in the computer bios or you can use the AISuite utility that comes with the motherboard. A lot of factors will affect the stability when over clocked (things like the quality of the power supply, cooling ect). I don’t think anyone can say there is a base freq over clock that is 100 percent stable, because everyone has a different set up. You really need to play around with the settings to find the best speed.

-John