Q9450 max safe temps? Vcore and VTT?

Well I finally setup my new EVGA 750i FTW board and I must say I'm totally impressed sofar coming from a Gigabyte P35-DS3L. So far not only does it overclock my Q9450 much easier, but I also now have SLI goodness with twin 9800GTX boards.

My P35-DS3L wouldn't get the Q9450 past 3.0ghz stable no matter what I did - I guess it just doesn't like the 45nm quads much. With this EVGA 750i board overclocking the q9450 is an entirely different story!

Right now I've achieved 3.6ghz stable (well, priming for 3+ hours now...) but at the cost of the following voltage settings:

vcore/VID: 1.425v (CPU-Z reads 1.41v idle, 1.38v load)
VTT (FSB voltage): 1.30v

My question for you guys is: What's the maximum safe vcore and vtt for an air cooled 45nm quad core? I've read a few isolated horror stories of people killing their 45nm quads with too much VTT but I've not seen any concrete 'safe' voltage boundries agreed upon yet.

Also, what's considered a safe temperature for these babies? My Q9450 is running about 60C after priming for 3+ hours. That's with a lapped Tuniq Tower sitting on it... is this a safe temperature?


Forgive the n00bish questions, folks. This isn't my first BBQ by any means, but it IS my first 45nm chip and sofar it seems to be loads different than the 65nm Q6600s I'm so used to.

Also this Nforce board is totally different than the P35 boards as far as BIOS options go. In particular I've noticed some GTLREF voltage settings for each core - should I be leaving those alone or bumping them a little for o/cing?

Thanks guys!

IIRC, the recommended max vCore is 1.4V. However you can go as high as 1.45V which should be fine but no guarantee. At 1.4V, no chance of death.

Yeah apparently the 45nm CPUs cannot handle as much voltage as their 65nm cousins.

Keep the vtt under 1.4. Id say 1.3 max in order to prevent degradation and maybe even cpu death.