Overclocking Intel quad Q9400 HELP!!!

[KeepCalmAnd_CallMeHacker]

Hello, this is my first time ever to oc processor, I have this Q9400 with stock cooling paired with gtx 970 which I know is not good, 8gb ram(4 2gb stick that are all the same frequencies and timings), gigabyte ga p35c ds3r mobo which I heard is good for oc-ing and 450w corsair psu.

I want to oc Q9400 to at least 3.3ghz if it will act fine but I didnt find any good guide that explains how should I do it, I can just oc it but I want to make it work good with ram frequency I want to put FSB to 1:2 or 1:1 but I dont know exactly what should I do so I need some good guide or someone patient willing to explain it to me, ty in advance

[[☥] - CJ -]

you cant find anything? theres plenty of youtube videos that shows how to do it

[KeepCalmAnd_CallMeHacker]

Publicado originalmente por ☥ - CJ -:

you cant find anything? theres plenty of youtube videos that shows how to do it

I said I didnt find any good guide, everyone just oc proc and say to check temp if it is ok and doesnt crash just leave it like that, but I know thats not the way to oc so I need some help from someone here who can explain to me everything I should look for and stuff or will put some really good oc tutorial/guide

[[☥] - CJ -]

honestly i would just leave it as is, you're already pretty bottlenecked with that CPU anyway.
AND, if you screw up you can trash the memory controller making the board unusable

I had that happen with a Q8300 system ages ago, but luckily for me the warranty got me a replacement, but i never used the board so i still have it practically brand new lol.

But yeah
even if you can OC it i doubt it would help much, especially with a stock cooler.
-

Actually, that pretty much is how you OC a CPU
You up the clocks
You test it to make sure its stable
And you make sure the temps dont go overboard
So doing it like that isnt exactly incorrect.

[xSOSxHawkens]

Turn off C states and power save. Set manual and locked voltages for vcore, memory, and chipset. Lookup what these need to be for each of your respective parts. Manually lock CPU multiplier to highest allowed. Manully set the bus speed to defaults. Manually set Memory timings, along with memory speed. Make sure your PCIe, PCI, and SATA are unlinked from FSB and locked. Again, part specific.

Boot and run tests and record to a Log. I will touch more on that in a second, along with what tests to use. Once you have done this you have a baseline to work off of.

Now for that chip you *can* just start working up. Note that as you have a locked chip you will raise the FSB to increase your speed. Doing so does a few things, mainly it will stress the CPU, the northbridge chipset, and the memory speed. At the onset before you up the FSB adjust down the DRAm ratio one notch so that your ram is underclocked, the watch the ram speed as it moves up with the bus speed changes. Once it is near Stock, drop it down again, assuming the CPU and motherboard are holding up to the FSB increases.

Watch temps as you go, raise voltages to the selected areas you suspect to tbe the point of failure untily ou feel you cannot offer more without temps being too high.

For a log, be detailed, record temps, times, and scores, for cores and packages, along with all relevant settings you used, and over time you will be able to track the curve of power demands by the chip, and you might even get a bit of extra juice out of it in ways aside from pure core speed increases. FSB increases are great on such older chips not jsutt he core speeds.

[_I_]

do not overclock with stock cooling period

[HALO_run]

Publicado originalmente por KeepCalmAnd_CallMeHacker:

Hello, this is my first time ever to oc processor, I have this Q9400 with stock cooling paired with gtx 970 which I know is not good, 8gb ram(4 2gb stick that are all the same frequencies and timings), gigabyte ga p35c ds3r mobo which I heard is good for oc-ing and 450w corsair psu.

I want to oc Q9400 to at least 3.3ghz if it will act fine but I didnt find any good guide that explains how should I do it, I can just oc it but I want to make it work good with ram frequency I want to put FSB to 1:2 or 1:1 but I dont know exactly what should I do so I need some good guide or someone patient willing to explain it to me, ty in advance

if it's not water cooled i'd say no plus q9550 or a q9650 if the broad works with it, would work better then over clocking

[The Winter Soldier]

I have not used the Q9400 before. I have used the Q6700, which is very similar.

Overclocking to 3GHz didn't do much for me, as these old Core 2 processors are limited by their lack of cache and low IPC as well as their frequency.

You can see here how a Q9650 (a few models up from your Q9400, it's @3GHz) doesn't really do all that well in more recent titles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T01SfP0zwzw

You should be happy you made it basically two console generations on a CPU from 2008 and look ahead to Ryzen 4000 or whatever Intel does next.

[xSOSxHawkens]

Publicado originalmente por JohnChronic420:

I have not used the Q9400 before. I have used the Q6700, which is very similar.

Overclocking to 3GHz didn't do much for me, as these old Core 2 processors are limited by their lack of cache and low IPC as well as their frequency.

You can see here how a Q9650 (a few models up from your Q9400, it's @3GHz) doesn't really do all that well in more recent titles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T01SfP0zwzw

You should be happy you made it basically two console generations on a CPU from 2008 and look ahead to Ryzen 4000 or whatever Intel does next.

Big impact going from 3.0 to 3.6. Specifically I noticed the bigest jump in real world performance around 3.4+

Pushing a higher FSB helps too, special on 6k series chips. Ran mine past 1800Mhz. Allowed it to be within reasonable performance pacing to first gen i7's that it negated a need for an upgrade at the time (q6700). Though it is dated by todays standards.

No longer have that chip, but have an AMD quad thats nearly identical in performance, and though slow it can still game ;) (kinda)

[The Winter Soldier]

Dang. Now I'm gonna have to see how far I can push it. Iirc I only pushed the FSB up to like, 1333 mhz, resulting in a core clock slightly over 3GHz.

[HALO_run]

Publicado originalmente por JohnChronic420:

Dang. Now I'm gonna have to see how far I can push it. Iirc I only pushed the FSB up to like, 1333 mhz, resulting in a core clock slightly over 3GHz.

q9650 is a better cpu to oc if you're into that, that is

https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core2-Quad-Q9650-vs-Intel-Core2-Quad-Q6700/m1706vsm3748

plus the Q9650 Released date ≤ Q4 2013

[nullable]

I love how people are recommending incremental upgrades for a 12 year old CPU because it might OC a bit better or just be more convenient for conversation if it were some other model. I mean sheesh. He's got a Q9400, that's what he's working with.

OP I'm sure there's plenty of guides too. I'm not sure what constitutes a good guide in your opinion so it makes it hard to post anything that you're not going to just dismiss. A lot of people ran various flavors of core 2 quads back then, I ran a Q6600 for years myself, and there seemed to be plenty of information about OCing that. I don't think the Q9400 is the one model without any decent information available. Nor do I think that it's so unique that a guide for one of the half dozen incrementally different models wouldn't work just as well.

[KeepCalmAnd_CallMeHacker]

Thank you all for help, guess I will look up guide for some other quad core similar processor and try to mimic it.

This pc was made out of 2 old pc's both from my friend everything but gpu, I put that gpu in because I dont have any other pc to put it in, this is not my main pc its just my side b11ch so I dont plan on upgrading it or anything, I will just try to OC that Q9400 and max it out until it dies, than just take out gpu and wont even be sad if anything happens to that pc since it is not my daily driver or anything

[KeepCalmAnd_CallMeHacker]

Also I would still like to ask what is FSB:DRAM, now in cpu z it shows that is is 5:6 and I see a lot of people say it should be either 1:1 or 1:2 so I want to know if anyone knows what and how should I do anything with that???

[HALO_run]

Publicado originalmente por Brockenstein:

I love how people are recommending incremental upgrades for a 12 year old CPU because it might OC a bit better or just be more convenient for conversation if it were some other model. I mean sheesh. He's got a Q9400, that's what he's working with.

OP I'm sure there's plenty of guides too. I'm not sure what constitutes a good guide in your opinion so it makes it hard to post anything that you're not going to just dismiss. A lot of people ran various flavors of core 2 quads back then, I ran a Q6600 for years myself, and there seemed to be plenty of information about OCing that. I don't think the Q9400 is the one model without any decent information available. Nor do I think that it's so unique that a guide for one of the half dozen incrementally different models wouldn't work just as well.

the q9650 is a 7 year old cpu and a better cpu to overclock, same as q9400 but it's still a good cpu for older games 2017

https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core2-Quad-Q9650-vs-Intel-Core2-Quad-Q9400/m1706vsm244

as to the op you'll need a water cooler never use stock cooler to oc, but the q9650 will overclock better then, at lest from tests, i did back in the day shows it as so

[nullable]

Publicado originalmente por HALO_run:

the q9650 is a 7 year old cpu and a better cpu to overclock, same as q9400 but it's still a good cpu for older games 2017

https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core2-Quad-Q9650-vs-Intel-Core2-Quad-Q9400/m1706vsm244

You're mistaken. Or rather your reliance on userbenchmark has failed you and/or you don't know what the less than symbol means...

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/35428/intel-core-2-quad-processor-q9650-12m-cache-3-00-ghz-1333-mhz-fsb.html

Q3 2008, so 12 years old, like I said. And for comparison 3rd gen Core CPU's were released in 2012. So the i5 3570k I bought in 2013 runs circles around the Q9650.

https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core2-Quad-Q9650-vs-Intel-Core-i5-3570K/m1706vs1316

I was running a Q6600 at OC'ed to 3.0ghz until 2013 and sure it was fine. But no amount of OCing is going to overcome the deficiencies compared to CPU's that were modern in 2013. And upgrading from a Q6600 to a Q9650 even in 2013 would have been pretty harebrained.

Publicado originalmente por HALO_run:

as to the op you'll need a water cooler never use stock cooler to oc, but the q9650 will overclock better then, at lest from tests, i did back in the day shows it as so

I've already addressed this. The Q9650 is better than the Q9400, but they're so old it doesn't matter. An extra 10-15% performance between 12 year old CPU's doesn't warrant the cost unless you get it for free, or overclocking "moar" is the only goal you care about, or getting a Q9650 has been a lifelong dream. None of which is really relevant to this topic. It's just deaf pedantry to ignore what hardware the OP has and what he's trying to do and why.

In general people aren't interested in dumping money or too much effort into 12 year old systems. And I believe OP has already echoed this sentiment as I predicted.