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p5w dh ? q9550


cameronboy
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Although i am a seasoned overclocker of my e6600@3600mh2 h20 stable two years

system built on p5wdh board i have considered an upgrade of cpu. i like playing games but encode a fair bit of the kids on mp4 hd quality so quads for rendering is a need.

i have considered a quad Q6600 but the new q9550 on 45 nan tech may be the way to go i will update my bios to 2801 to accommodate the q9550 cpu but i was wondering if anyone else has

tried this path most of the o'clocking sites have moved on from the p5w dh boards so i cant find any posts i am not sure but a lot of the early q6600 wouldnt clock past 3200mhz on a p5wdh.

Seeing as the p5wdh is a good mac base board i was wondering if anyone else has taken this path and what results they had with a q9550.

thanks

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hey Cameronboy, just registered here as I have just recently upgraded to the Q9550 (C1 stepping S-spec SLAWQ) and am running the P5W DH Deluxe. It appears that relatively few people are running this config, probably because its a fairly new CPU, and that not many are choosing to run it on what is now considered to be an "old" board/chipset. To this end, I thought I'd offer you what I know, what my experiences are so far and in the hope that if you do jump up to the same config and buy the Q9550, that if either of us come across any issues, we hopefully have somewhere to start resolving them with info from eachother.

 

Anyway, here's my history and findings. In summary, the setup runs fine without any major issues.

 

 

However, that being said, I'm now going to go more indepth so you understand my setup and why I've done certain things, some of this stuff may help you decide one way or another in your purchase.

 

Anyway, my setup - I upgraded from an E6600 B2 step which I ran moderately overclocked to 2.8Ghz using the stock E6600 heatsink. I state this now, as on opening the retail box of the Q9550 to install it, on taking out the old heatsink and chip from the board I realised that there's a big difference in the cooler that I had previously to that which comes with the Q9550. The "new" cooler is basically shallower i.e that the old cooler sits larger with more aluminium fins. That also, the "new" cooler had a lot less copper as its base footprint (The part that makes contact to the CPU heatspreader) Because of this, and that my case can sometimes get a little warm (Its an old Antec, and I'm running 3 SATA drives and a 8800GTS) I figured that the old E6600 stock cooler would probably be a better choice than the stock Q9550 to keep it cool for the moment.

 

I set about flashing the bios before the upgrade, and am running the new chip under the 2801 bios, even though I could technically have run it on the 2704 for my chip revision - newest bios means I'm covered for everything, and I didn't know which chip revision I'd get when I shopped for it at a computer fair. I don't have a floppy drive installed so I flashed using a 512MB USB stick, jumped into EZ Flash from within the bios menu, followed the instructions, it was all pretty easy and flashed first time without issue. The E6600 had no issue after the flash either.

 

Upon installing the Q9550, I got a bit panicked at first as the machine wouldn't post. It wasn't until I completely cleared the CMOS (using the CLRTR jumper) that I got the board to post. Basically, because I had previously overclocked my E6600, I'd unlocked the multiplier setting and had that set statically to 9x. Because the new chip runs at 8.5x, the board wouldn't POST initially. After resetting the bios, the machine posted normally back to the BIOS setup.

 

Now, it was at this point that I realised that because the Intel 975 chipset, which is what the P5W Dh del is based on, is only really meant to be a 1066Mhz FSB - that this chip being a 1333FSB, the board basically runs its FSB overclocked. This isn't a problem in itself, but that because of this, I doubt we'd be able to overclock this chip in this board by much if at all. At least, I haven't tried yet and am kind of uneasy about trying, being that I'm already technically overclocking the older technology of the board chipset, but it's currently working okay, albeight the northbridge does perhaps seem to be slightly warmer to the touch.

 

Another thing to consider, that I didn't realise until I started running this config is that because the FSB is being overclocked, Asus have killed C1E support for this chip/board combination with the 2801 bios (I'm unsure about the 2704 as I haven't downgraded to try it) This basically means that the CPU/board won't "speedstep" down to a lower clock speed whenever you're not actually doing anything (loading the chip) It basically will continually idle at its maximum clock. Whilst I've monitored temperatures using Real Temp and Core Temp (Which displays a +10C varience - Real Temp is more accurate) My temperatures are around an average of 45C at idle, and upto 65C at full load - remember that this is using a stock E6600 cooler. I haven't lapped the cooler or the CPU, nor have I really done anything with the thermal compound. I'm thinking of upgrading the cooling to an OCZ Vendetta 2, using a Thermal Right Socket 775 bolt-on kit (instead of the damn push-pins) and using some Arctic Silver 5 - Hopefully this will bring the temperatures down further, especially for load temps and prolong the life of the CPU. Might also then make it to a small overclock, but I doubt it.

 

One last thing to note - the minimum CPU core voltage that this bios supports is 1.225V - that in CPU-Z, with the board set to auto setting for the VCore, that the chip is run at 1.225 - some consider this to be quite a high voltage for stock, and of course this is another reason why the CPU may run a little warm in comparison to what it probably should be doing. Apparently the "safe range" for the CPU is 0.85V to 1.35V so at stock on this board, its running towards the upper end of that scale already.

 

I am loath to purchase a new board, as am fond of the one I have and it's served me well thus far. It's still going strong, and with all the available inputs etc, it would be a pain to have to shop around for a new one. Thus I'm going to leave it at stock for the time being, and just upgrade my cooling. I haven't really got cash for a new board right now so will be running this rig for the forseeable future. I can't justify upgrading the board to be able to support faster FSBs, just so I can OC the chip if it runs fine at stock.

 

I've had the occasional system freeze in Vista Ultimate (32bit) but haven't yet pinpointed it down to exactly why yet. It maybe the cooling, but we'll see. The old E6600 was rock stable for nearly 2 years before upgrade.

 

Any further info you want to know, just post back.

 

Oh and my CPU-Z validation for you to check and verify if you want (so you know I'm not just spinning a line of my setup) is at http://valid.x86-secret.com/show_oc.php?id=432592 - Yes, I mistyped my name but hell, Its 4am now and that was done just after 2am GMT. (I'm in the UK btw *yawns and pads off to bed*)

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  • 1 year later...
Although i am a seasoned overclocker of my e6600@3600mh2 h20 stable two years

system built on p5wdh board i have considered an upgrade of cpu. i like playing games but encode a fair bit of the kids on mp4 hd quality so quads for rendering is a need.

i have considered a quad Q6600 but the new q9550 on 45 nan tech may be the way to go i will update my bios to 2801 to accommodate the q9550 cpu but i was wondering if anyone else has

tried this path most of the o'clocking sites have moved on from the p5w dh boards so i cant find any posts i am not sure but a lot of the early q6600 wouldnt clock past 3200mhz on a p5wdh.

Seeing as the p5wdh is a good mac base board i was wondering if anyone else has taken this path and what results they had with a q9550.

thanks

You can run the Q9550 on the P5W DH Deluxe (I’m using BIOS 3001). However the P5WDHD’s 1033 FSB and lack of fractional multiplier support does not permit you to fully exploit OC’ing the Q9550.

The native FSB speed of the P5WDHD is 1033 MHz. The newer BIOS seems to be designed to handle the situation as best it can. My P5DDHD, running in AUTO, sets 354.28 x 8.0 to achieve the 2.83 GHz native speed of the Q9550; effective FSB of 1417.13. But this doesn’t leave you much room for further OC’ing since you’re already well above the native FSB of the P5WDHD. Too bad. I ran my E6600 - which this board is exceptionally well suited for - at 3 GHz on air, rock solid.

 

On the up side, there IS a significant performance boost over the E6600. The quad cores kick in extra horsepower. The system is stable.

I’ll be moving on to manually tweaking to up the speed. I haven’t had much chance to experiment yet. I’d be interested in what other folks have been able to achieve. But this isn’t the best MOBO/processor combo.

Q9550; BIOS: 3001

Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C4 2GB

Gigabyte N7600GT

Arctic Freezer Pro 7

WinXPSP3-32; Vista SP2-32 dual boot

Seagate ST3320620AS 320 GB SATA 3 x 2 in RAID1

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