Planning on overclocking Q6600 soon, need a little advice

[sswilson]

Try bumping your CPU &/or NB volts a notch... could be the extra drain on the PSU for 3D graphics is causing those voltages to drop below a stable level.

[Matt]

CPU is at 1.3 now, what should I try for northbridge voltage? The P5Q-E doesn't show what the current voltage is, just "auto". I also disabled load line calibration, that's the setting that reduces vdroop. I'll try enabling that, I just had it off for stability testing because it sometimes raises vcore under load then it could still be unstable when it's idle.

[Matt]

Okay I just checked the voltages on my power supply by jumpering the 24-pin connector while everything was disconnected. 12v and 5v rails are fine but the 3.3v rail is only 2.75v. Worse yet, it drops to 2.69 when I measure the voltage while the computer is on. I think it's borked, should I RMA it?

EDIT: Ooops, sorry for double post.

[sswilson]

20% sounds like it's out of spec to me, but SKYMTL would have a better idea of what is and isn't allowed for tolerances.

[Matt]

AFAIK even cheaper voltage regulators would probably still only be around ±5%. I've posted on the Corsair support forums, I'll see what they have to say on Monday.

EDIT: Funny, looking on the Corsair forums I found at least 5 other posts about shutdowns during gaming and one other post about a boot up problem that I am also experiencing. Maybe a bad batch got out or something.

[_Sigma]

You have lock the PCI bus speed at 100mhz. Did you do this? If not, and it's set to auto, it follows the FSB and you get an OC on the bus = unstable. That would explain why it is only present when you OC.