As I mentioned, I would be thrilled to get more juice out of my CPU, but I’m not going to do it at the expense of causing my system to crash, overheat or otherwise become unstable.
A lot of my reading led me to believe that by changing only my motherboard’s FSB (front side bus) speed, I could get more performance without needing to tweak other values.
So in my ASUS P5E’s BIOS, I went to the Extreme Tweaker menu. The standard value for practically everything is “Auto”. I changed AI Overclock Tuner to Manual, which exposes the FSB Frequency option. The current value of the FSB was 266 MHz. The standard multiplier value for my Q6600 Intel Core 2 Quad CPU is 9X, so the effective CPU speed was 2.4 GHz. I changed the FSB value to 300 (which would take me to 2.7 GHz), and then restarted.
In running the rebooted system, everything seemed fine and the “CPUID” tool did indeed report that it was running at 2.7 Ghz. After a couple hours of running, using Sonar, Live and Reason I didn’t see any indication that the temperatures were getting out of hand. So that experiment worked OK.
The next step is to try 333 MHz which would give me an effective speed of about 3.0 GHz. Everything I’ve read indicates that that should be no problem for my system. We’ll see…
An interesting feature of this CPU is the “SpeedStep” option. Apparently, the system runs at a 6X FSB spped ratio most of the time and kicks itself up to 9X when additional power is required. This seems to work, as I can monitor the speed using the ASUS tool that comes with it.
ASUS also has a tool that supposedly lets you tweak BIOS parameters which running Windows (which takes effect on next boot) but I have heard people have reservations about using that. It also makes me nervous that even the most recent version of AI Suite will CRASH if you set it to run in “Turbo mode.” So I don’t fiddle with those settings.
