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LanceDiamond
Limp Gawd
- Joined
- Oct 11, 2005
- Messages
- 361
I'm building my brother a computer and figured that was a reasonable excuse to just give him my Q6600 CPU which I'd been running @ 3.2 for about 6 months and get myself a Q9650. Yes, I guess I have more money than sense - the Q9650 was $550ish - about as much as the computer I'm building him lol...
I got the new parts in Monday, let them sit around a few days and finally got around to installing the Q9650 in place of the Q6600 on Thursday. First thing about it that was encouraging was that after verifying it would boot, I changed nothing but the FSB and memory ratio just to see how it felt about 3.6 @ stock voltage... The Q9650 laughed at my feeble attempt to get it not to boot - booted and ran Prime95 for ~10min @ stock volts with 4GB memory just fine.
I also went to 8GB memory as part of this process (they're almost giving memory away now it's so cheap) and I did run into one issue there. I still had it clocked @ 3.6, stuck in 8GB and was greeted by a CMOS checksum error asking me to insert a boot disk. Initally to clear this, I dropped back to 4GB but once I figured out it was related to having 8GB installed, I just started tweaking BIOS settings and using the reset CMOS switch to clear the error every time. It would always boot at stock speed with 8GB and CMOS was never really bad.
Eventually I arrived at 1.41v for MCH and 2.0v on the DDR2 to get it happy at 3.6 with 8GB - STILL at stock volts on the CPU VID. I also manually set the memory to 5-5-5-18, I might be able to improve that some, not sure. With these settings, it ran Prime95 for about 10 hours and never broke 69c on any core.
The only down side, if you can call it that, is that I'm not sure if I will be able to find the max speed this CPU is capable of - the only memory I have is PC6400. I may get motivated to figure out how far I can push the memory and then see where the 9x multi takes the CPU but it seems just fine at 9 x 400, memory 1:1 and I'm thrilled with it soo I dunno.
So 45nm, Q9650 seems great. Subjectively I notice ZERO difference from the Q6600 but I didn't figure I would notice any difference. I was just doing this for fun, not for some noticable performance gain.
Ok, NOW I'm done upgrading for a while!
I got the new parts in Monday, let them sit around a few days and finally got around to installing the Q9650 in place of the Q6600 on Thursday. First thing about it that was encouraging was that after verifying it would boot, I changed nothing but the FSB and memory ratio just to see how it felt about 3.6 @ stock voltage... The Q9650 laughed at my feeble attempt to get it not to boot - booted and ran Prime95 for ~10min @ stock volts with 4GB memory just fine.
I also went to 8GB memory as part of this process (they're almost giving memory away now it's so cheap) and I did run into one issue there. I still had it clocked @ 3.6, stuck in 8GB and was greeted by a CMOS checksum error asking me to insert a boot disk. Initally to clear this, I dropped back to 4GB but once I figured out it was related to having 8GB installed, I just started tweaking BIOS settings and using the reset CMOS switch to clear the error every time. It would always boot at stock speed with 8GB and CMOS was never really bad.
Eventually I arrived at 1.41v for MCH and 2.0v on the DDR2 to get it happy at 3.6 with 8GB - STILL at stock volts on the CPU VID. I also manually set the memory to 5-5-5-18, I might be able to improve that some, not sure. With these settings, it ran Prime95 for about 10 hours and never broke 69c on any core.
The only down side, if you can call it that, is that I'm not sure if I will be able to find the max speed this CPU is capable of - the only memory I have is PC6400. I may get motivated to figure out how far I can push the memory and then see where the 9x multi takes the CPU but it seems just fine at 9 x 400, memory 1:1 and I'm thrilled with it soo I dunno.
So 45nm, Q9650 seems great. Subjectively I notice ZERO difference from the Q6600 but I didn't figure I would notice any difference. I was just doing this for fun, not for some noticable performance gain.
Ok, NOW I'm done upgrading for a while!
