Overclocking the G0 SLACR Q6600 to 4GHz

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Test System Setup

Processor(s): Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 @ Various

Cooling: Corsair Nautilus500 (Supplied by Corsair) with Arctic Cooling MX-2 Thermal Compound (Supplied by Arctic Cooling)

Motherboard(s): ASUS Blitz Extreme (Supplied by ASUS)

Memory: 2 X 1GB Corsair XMS3 DDR-3 1066MHz 7-7-7-21 (Supplied by Corsair)

Hard Disk(s): Hitachi 80GB 7200RPM SATA-2

Graphics Card(s): 2x HIS HD 2900 XT 1GB in Crossfire (Supplied by HIS Digital)

Operating System: Windows XP Professional SP2

Drivers: ATI Catalyst 7.8 and DX9c

In an ideal world, we would like to use a set memory speed for each OC but in this case each FSB OC was running a different RAM speed. So, at 266MHz FSB we were running at 1066MHz DDR, at 333MHz FSB at 1067MHz DDR, 367MHz FSB at 1101MHz DDR, 400MHz FSB at 1000MHz DDR and finally at 422MHz FSB we were at 1055MHz DDR.

As you can see, there isn't a whole lot of different in memory speeds but it's worth noting.

We’re not going to go too crazy with the benchmarks. What we will do is look at 3DMark05 and 3DMark06 simply because it wouldn't be right not to. It’s the synthetic benchmark that you can’t live with or without.

G0ing a bit real now. We’ll look at a few games like Company of Heroes and Prey, but before we wrap it all up we had better grab some power readings from the system to see just how much we’re harming the environment. The chances are you probably haven't gotten this far and you're already looking at the benchmark results so I'll wrap this up and move forward!

3DMark05

Version and / or Patch Used: Build 130

Developer Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com

Product Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com/products/3dmark05/

Buy It Here

3DMark05 is now the second latest version in the popular 3DMark “Gamers Benchmark” series. It includes a complete set of DX9 benchmarks which tests Shader Model 2.0 and above.

For more information on the 3DMark05 benchmark, we recommend you read our preview here.

2.4GHz to 3GHz gives us some nice gains, but you can see @ 3.3GHz it’s getting pretty serious. Move up again to 3.6GHz and it’s getting a bit intense, and finally go to 3.8GHz and you’re blowing our mind! A lovely 20k default run in 3DMark05, 7000 marks up from the original clock.