E6600 max O/C on air?

[jonathanc]

Hi all!

Just wanted to know if it's advisable to push my E6600 further. I am now on 3.2Ghz @ 1/3Vcore and +0.1 vram. The idle temps floats at around 41oC at normal room temp and 58oC when under full Prime95 stress test. The system is now stable (well tested prime for 5 hours and around 3 hours of Orthos). I could push it up to around 3.8Ghz on air and it would boot up Windows fine.

The problem is it runs at 50oC idle and touching 69oC on Prime and its not stable. however I only pushed the Vcore to 1.49V and ram to +0.2V . I am wondering if I can push my current overclock further than 3.2 as I heard after that the volt/ghz increase ration is just not worth it.

I am running on GIGABYTE EP35C-DS3R mobo. I really dont want to fry anything as I am not planning on hardware upgrades till summer when decent mobos + that sweet Q9xxx series comes out.

Any ideas/opinions guys?

p/s: What i am really interested to know if I would actually notice any difference if I o/ced it to above 3.6Ghz if I am already at 3.2 now. I do mostly memory intensive applications (AutoCad, Maya, 3dS, MSVS2005) and multitasking (well I like opening a lot of other apps and windows when i am doing my work) and ofc some gaming like CoD4 etc.

 

[TC91]

well for me, there is a slight difference subjectively with 3.4ghz and 3.6ghz, but 3.6 was too hot for me, and it required 1.46v or 1.48v which i deemed was too much for me, as well the temperatures were a bit too high for me (67c peak on dual prime small fft's) so i decided to back down to 3.4ghz. you probably can push farther on your oc, but you might potentially fry your cpu in the process, if you are running it at temps >70c for an extended period of time with all of that extra voltage.