The Scottish Boinc Team

Antel E8400 Dual Core Processor
Asus P5K-E Wifi Edition Motherboard
nVidia GeForce 8800 GTX (768mb)
Creative X-FI Xtreme Soundcard
2x1GB Corsair Dominator PC2-8500 (1066MHz)
Arctic Cooler Freezer Pro 7
750GB Samsung Sata2 HD753L HDD With XP Pro SP3
320GB Sata Internal Hard Drive
Hiper Type-R Modular 580W PSU

I've been meaning to start my hand at overclocking but kept putting it off. I finally started tonight by reading some guides and trying out a few things.

At the moment I have managed to get my E8400 to 3.37GHz and it seems stable. Have run Prime95 for a few hours, 3D Marks 2001SE, Super PI and had a quick game of TF2.

3DMarks went from 58456 to 63006
Super PI 1M digits from 15.5s to 13.062 2M digits from 37.766s to 32.366s

Temperatures haven't seemed to moved much at all only going up by a couple degrees. Idle at approx 35 degrees and load 43 degrees. I did try 3.6GHz (400fsb 9x multiplier), it managed to boot into windows and I ran CPU-Z and SuperPI but it then froze a few minutes later and rebooted. I haven't tried changing any voltages as I need to read a bit more into detail first.

One weird thing was I disabled SpeedStep in the bios as per the guides but when using CPU-Z I noticed the cpu was still being underclocked (dropping to 6x multiplier) when idle. Checking the BIOS and it is still disabled so I'm not sure what's happening there.

I've been searching Google trying to find a guide for my mobo/cpu combination but don't seem to be having much luck. I'm not really looking for a huge overclock i.e. 4GHz, I'd be happy to reach 3.5/3.6GHz stable.

Anyone have any tips ?

I have a similar setup (well, the motherboard and PSU are the same, but with a Q6600) and get the same slowdown when the system is not under load. According to CPU-Z, it's the multiplier which is reducing from 9x to 6x when the system is unloaded, but the clock speed stays the same.

Ian

Yeah I read it was SpeedStep that does that when enabled but even when I disable it in the BIOS it still happens. The overclock seems to be stable on 3.37GHz so far, no crashes. I might run it a while longer on this and start upping it again when I feel a bit braver :)

Yeah, I don't know what the change in the BIOS to stop it from slowing down, but since my system runs BOINC at 100% all the time, it's not really a problem.
Your temps seem quite low. Is that the core temp or the CPU temp which you are quoting? My CPU temp at full load ( and currently slowed down to 2.7GHz because of the warm weather) is 41 DegC, whereas my core temps are peaking at 57 DegC.

Ian

I'm not too sure to be honest. I'm running Asus Probe 2 to monitor temps/voltages etc at the moment because I couldn't get Motherboard Monitor to install as I didn't see my board listed when installing.

CPU at the moment is reading 45 degrees full load but it doesn't say if it's core temp or what. Motherboard temp is reading as 31 degrees. I got an Arctic Cooler Freezer Pro 7 running and just reapplied thermal paste yesterday so it is running a little cooler than usual. I also cleaned out a lot of dust in my system, I need to do that more often.

As i said before I did have it boot at 3.6GHz but it crashed after running a couple things. I might have needed to up the voltage but I'm not too confident with changing that as I didn't really know the defaults to begin with.