Problems with Droop and Q6600 overclocking on Asus P5K?
Problems with Droop and Q6600 overclocking on Asus P5K?
Attempting to overclock a Q6600 G0 on an Asus P5K motherboard with CPU-Z is confusing me. Setting everything to auto gives a Vcore around 1.088–1.1 both idle and under load. This is extremely low considering my VID of 1.2125. When I tried a 9x333 pattern from 2.4GHz, I increased the voltage to 1.3 as most guides suggest. However, it appears there’s a problem with the newer P5K bios causing a 0.1V discrepancy between what’s set and what’s delivered. At 1.45 V bios I see 1.320 at idle and running Prime95, 1.288, 1.264, and a minimum of 1.256 Vcore. This means there’s not just a small difference but a noticeable drop, resulting in a VDroop of about 0.7 to 0.8. Asus P5K bios also seem to have nonfunctional LLC, which is good news. My questions are:
1: Is it safe to modify the board to reduce VDroop?
2: Should I downgrade the BIOS since EZFlash won’t support it?
3: Is a 1.1 Vcore on auto stable, or is this linked to the 0.1V bios issue? I’ll run Prime95 on auto for 24 hours to see.
Running it on auto and stock clock with Prime95 for 8 hours showed no problems. The vcore was around 1.1, increasing to 1.3 at idle and 1.23 under load. Temperatures stayed stable at 67°C on the first two cores and 61°C on the third and fourth. P95 Small FFTs remained consistent for the last 14 hours. With the 1066 RAM I ordered (8 gigs), I’d be able to boost it to 3.2 with a 400 MHz FSB, reaching 800 MHz, though I’m unsure if that would require raising the NB voltage and risking cooling issues. I’m still puzzled why auto mode gives a Vcore of 1.112, just 0.1 off from the VID. Others mentioned a 0.1V difference in the P5K bios when set manually—does this also apply to auto settings?
The system is so outdated that upgrading doesn’t seem worth it (it’s hypocritical since I actually pulled out the drives, which was exactly what I intended to do). Still, I’ve enjoyed experimenting with it, including overclocking.