What parts do we need?

So you want to get a G0 revision Q6600 but you’re not 100% on what to look out for. It’s a relatively easy task, on each Intel processor box we have a large sticker that sits on the side and gives us a whole lot of information.

First you want to make sure the actual processor is the Core 2 Quad Q6600 which is stated across the top, and from there we want to move down to roughly the the half way mark.

The particular section we’re looking for is the PROD CODE, and what we’re actually looking for in this is the last five letters. In this case we have SLACR at the end of our product code. Bingo! This is exactly what we want. If you have some crazy sales person telling you that a SL9UM is the same thing, raise your hand, give them a bitchslap and walk off!



Do a Google search for Q6600 SLACR and you will see that you’ve hit the CPU lottery jackpot. Now you’ve got the CPU it’s time to do a bit of board shopping.

There are a large number of boards that will handle your G0 overclocking with no real dramas, but we want to look at the cream of the crop.

Depending on your budget, the cream of the crop comes in the form of the ASUS Blitz series and the DFI P35-T2R. These are two boards that have gathered some very quick momentum in the overclocking community.

Too expensive? Start looking at the ASUS P5K-E or P5K Deluxe, or if you’re a Gigabyte fan the P35-DQ6 is a great option too.

If you've got more dollars than sense you can go down the DDR3 route and pick yourself up an ASUS Blitz Extreme motherboards, this is also what we’ll be using today.

If we recommend the DFI P35-T2R so highly why aren’t we using that? Personally I’m completely DDR3 happy, but more credit goes to the Crosslinx technology offered on the Blitz series of boards. We get two 8x lanes instead of a 16x and 4x setup offered by all other P35 boards. The reason we want two 8x lanes is because we want to use 2x HIS 1GB HD2900XT cards in Crossfire, and we thought we should do it right!




I had already finished this particular page before I started testing, but when we fired up the “power thingy” it was clear that we had better mention how important it is to have a decent power supply. We managed to break the 600Watt barrier, and by a far bit at that. It’s clear if you're overclocking and want to get into some performance computing, a decent quality power supply is needed. You have to also take into account that our test system here is running the bare minimum.