Question regarding old GA-EP35C-DS3R board and Q6600.

[Merkury]

I have owned this machine for several years and have tweaked it to my heart's content. It honestly still does what I ask it to and I'm sure an i7 would smoke it, but you can't compare it to what you have never tried. With that aside, I have been running this machine with 2x2GB sticks of 1066 Dominator DDR2 memory since it was new. At some point I ended up with more ram in the form of 2x1GB 800 XMS2 DDR2. That gave me a total of 6GB, albeit in a weird way, but it worked. On top of all that, I had the machine overclocked from FSB of 266 all the way to 400 and I had my Q6600 running at 3.20 Ghz on a 8x multiplier. As far as the ram went, I ran it at 800 5-5-5-15.

 

So, today I installed 2x4GB Vengeance 1600 DDR3 (yes this board allows DDR2 or DDR3). Much to my surprise, my overclock was no longer stable. After much fussing around, I managed to get it up to a 366 FSB with a 9x multiplier. That makes my Q6600 a little faster at 3.294 Ghz. My new Vengeance ram is running at 1464 MHz. I have not worked at the overclock a lot, but I am looking for any advice on the subject.

 

My options for voltage are as follows:

DDR2/DDR3 OverVoltage Control [Normal]

PCI-E OverVoltage Control [Normal]

FSB OverVoltage Control [+0.1]

(G)MCH OverVoltage Control [Normal]

CPU Voltage Control [1.45000V]

 

Before today, the only adjustment I had made was to overvolt the ram to 2.1V and I set the CPU to 1.45.

Today, in order to increase my FSB from 333 to 366, I had to add +0.1 to the FSB.

I tried increasing the (G)MCH by .1 and then .2 while at 400 FSB, but it would not post.

I have not tried increasing the FSB higher.

 

I would also like to know if any of these timings would improve the ram performance:

ACT to ACT Delay (tRRD)

Rank Write To READ Delay (tWTR)

Write To Precharge Delay (tWR)

Refresh to ACT Delay (tRFC)

Read to Precharge Delay (tRTP)

Static tRead Value (tRD)

Static tRead Phase Adjust

 

Thanks goes out to anyone that can still remember the good old Q6600 and who is willing to impart some knowledge!!

[peanutz94]

The only suggestion I can make is to back down the voltage on the Vengeance modules. Anything over 2.0v voids the warranty is out of spec for those modules and can damage the RAM.

 

Your using different memory with different voltage requirements and so on, so the fact hat your OC is no longer stable isn't a surprise. Unfortunately, the only thing I can offer there is to start over, but keep the DIMM voltage down.

[Merkury]

I probably was not clear, but I am no longer running the ram at 2.1 volts. I only used that voltage with the ddr2. The voltage for the ram is set to normal now and the bios confirms that it is running at 1.5 volts.