[ricknash61]

Yeah, one advantage of winter approaching is colder ambient temps which means overclocking potential. Unfortunately, my gf likes to turn up the heat in our apartment, making the the house much warmer than I would like it...

I'm like you buddy, I got a q9550 right after they released it, which means I'm stuck with a C1 revision. So far, it hasn't required too much voltage to bring it to 3.6ghz. We'll see how much it takes to bring it to 3.8ghz and whether I feel comfortable with the temps. Speaking of temps, I'm going to buy another fan (Noctua NF-P12) to attach to my heatsink so that I have push and pull airflow since SKYMTL's review noted a decrease of around 5C at load with this type of setup. If that still doesn't give me good temps, I will probably reseat the heatsink and check if the temps get any better. I'm dreading this because it means I'll have to take out my mobo from my case and reconnect everything afterwards.

Headshot, what heatsink are you using?

Also, when I stress tested my RAM, I had the latency settings on auto, which means my RAM OC'ed to 900mhz but the timings dropped slightly, 5-6-6-20, if I recall correctly. Are these timings drastically slower than 5-5-5-18? I'm going to play around with timings after I achieve my desired CPU overclock, so its not all that important at the moment.

I didn't bother running prime 95 last night but i did manage to pass intel burn test (5 runs at maximum), which leads me to believe this OC is stable (woohoo 3.6 ghz!!!).

Now all I need is some free time to get to 3.8!

JD