QX9650 HELP PLEASE!

[Dominic]

Ok I just bought a qx9650. I ran 3dmark 9x400 at 3.6ghz and scored 13200. Then i raised fsb to 10x400 and ran 3dmark again and scored at 134887? is something wrong here but did i get a bad cpu? Also the temps idle at 50c at 10x400 which is high i believe. I need help really bad so if its bad i need to return it right away for a new one!! I scored higher with my q6600 running at 3.6ghz. I have the right bios and voltage is stable with prime95.

Asus maximus SE
QX9650
Thermaltake 700watt toughpower
2 gig 1066mhz corsair memory
Nvidia 8800 ultra

[FDIV]

Overclockability varies dramatically chip to chip. People are often surprised to find that a 2.4ghz chip and a 2.6ghz chip come from the same wafer and are in design exactly the same with one testing capable of going faster than the other does do to microscopic flaws and such. Of course as a fabrication process improves with time more often than not most of the slower chips test to a higher clock rating than they are sold at and so we overclock them. This is easy with the extreme edition because they are not even clock locked.

With regard to your chip specifically. the 45nm process is brand spanking new so one might expect chip to chip variance to be greater than with a mature technology. The 3d mark scores do not really bother me since both the q6600 (which is the chip I run coincidentally) and your smoking qx9650 are so fast that even with the 8800 ultra you may be mostly graphics card limited. I would not expect the performance with one running at 3.6ghz and the other at 4.0ghz to vary that greatly. It may in fact be a ddr2 vs ddr3 memory that is giving you slight variations. With increased speed come increased memory latency. The actual dram cells have not increased speed significantly and as a result sometimes ddr2 outperforms ddr3.

To condense these ramblings I do not believe your qx9650 is in any way defective but the high temperature it runs at (which is reallllly hot) combined with a fairly low overclocking overhead leaves me to believe that it is probably not the fastest chip off the wafer. If you exchange it the one you get may have a higher overclocking potential or it may have a lower. They are guaranteed only to run at stock speed and from what I have read most of them are not going much faster than stock. By the way 3.6ghz out of a q6600 it amazing you sure got a winner in that chip.

[Dominic]

Wow thats probably the best help i ever recieved, thank you!

Well if you are able to get a G0 stepping Q6600 you will be able to oc it to 3.6ghz with at about 1.4v and NB 1.4v with the right chipset of course EX: Intel X38.
I am overclocking my QX9650 at 10x400= 4.0ghz which is so easy on these new chips its not even funny with unlocked multiplier. I idle at 45-47c with water cooling, load is about 53-55c after an hour of playing COD 4. I mean its not terrible, the max temp is 85c is it not? Is it worth it to exchange for a different one from where I stand to take a chance and spend money for shipping or will i be ok for long term wise at these temps? i have the case door for the thermaltake armor with the 240mm fan that will blow on the cpu block pretty much so maybe it will drop a few degrees, plus the artic silver paste takes a little while to break in so i might see a degree or 2 drop? I have great cooling.

[Dominic]

I forgot to say i have that case door on order with the fan -dont have it yet-

[Chiefish]

And think about it , you cant even really use the power of the chip at stock speeds to its fullest potential yet, So o/c ing it is just for bragging rights. I have a q6600 as well and it the first stepping for them not a go, but i was able to run it a 3.6 without too much trouble, but to tell the truth i just backed it off to 3.0 because i dont see stressing the chip for no good reason. When they come out with more software that will actually take advantage of the multi cores then maybe it will be worth it to push it harder on a daily basis. But in the meantime im going to just take it easy with it and enjoy the multicore goodness that it offers.

[Dominic]

So what about my problem im having?

[Dominic]

with my temps im getting, did i get a not so good one from the factory? I read others having the qx9650 and they brag about how cool it is around 30c etc.... idling at 45-47c and load at 53-55c @ 4.0ghz be ok for years to come use?

[Dom]

Oh and also i see other 3dmark 06 benchmark scores with my same setup and im scoring a 13400 and they are scoring at 16000 or more, i think i need to exhange and hope for luck

[Dom]

Well, i downloaded the latest bios and i guess they had a bug in the temps where it was 15-20c high than what it really was. I am overclocking my qx9650 at 10x400 4.0ghz idling at 25c and full load at 35c. The only thing that still bothers me was the benchmark comparasins to others but i guess from what Chiefish said makes sense. So i guess ill keep it

[FDIV]

Much better. I would not consider exchanging the chip. kinda pathetic error to have in the bios somebody's going to loose their job. If you really want to see the power of your new beauty over the q6600 try a benchmark that does not rely also on the graphics processor. I believe the sandra CPU is a synthetic benchmark of this variety. Of course video encoding always works well for this to.

[Dom]

for some reason being a guest i have to use different names to post a reply lol

Alright so i downloaded the Sandra XIIc lite benchmark program and here are my blowing away results running at 10x400 @ 4.0ghz:

Processor Arithmetic:
Dhrystone ALU - 74679 MIPS
Whetstone ISSE3 - 58635 MFLOPS

Processor Multi-Media
Int x8 iSSE4.1 - 519138 iit/s
Float x4 iSSE2 - 239038 fit/s

Temperatures:
Idle:25c
Gaming Load 35c
Benchmark testing: 45-50c


Using a semi high end, 3/8 inch tubing water cooling system with external radiator. You can see the Huge performance gain from the 12mb L2 Cache.