squigly voltage lines limiting overclock?

[krazy_olie]

armed with a new cpu and new ram it didn't take me long to try and overclock!

it's a q6600 g0 which can supposedly hit very high speeds.

I had the e6300 clocked to about 2.8 with 2gb(2*1gb) and that is what i can now with the q6600 and 4gb RAM. Obviously it's a big improvement, the RAM probably makes the most difference but the cpu extra cache is good and multi threaded performance is obviously much better.... so not majorly annoyed and ran crysis for 2 hours solid without a single issue at this setup.

Anyway I think my PSU might be to blame for the only moderate overclock,
it's a 400w corsair, from when they were seasonic or something, so a good 400w but 400w nonetheless and I have a 460gtx in there.... which says it needs 450w min so I've probably answered my own question but do squigly lines on voltage graphs (accoding to easytune) suggest that this is the cause? Generally it fails to post if I do it too much and there is a small margin on speeds where it'll boot and fail reasonably quickly in a stress test.

Any way I can verify it? I think I have my old 7600 card lying around, presumably that's lower power and I can see where I get with it?

[Will404]

What ampage does the PSU supply to the 12V lines?

[krazy_olie]

No idea :-S. Where would I be able to find out?

[scaryjim]

What motherboard do you have? Some chipsets don't overclock the Core 2 Quads as well as the Duos...

[krazy_olie]

It's 965p s3 rev 1, with whatever the latest bios is

That didn't cross my mind, sounds plausible thinking about it I think the cpu is only supported after some fairly late bios update in the first place. I have tried doing it with a lower multiplier and higher fsb with no luck. It lasted a little longer if I booted up and 2.8 then upped the fsb in easytune (gigabyte software) rebooted itself when running prime at 3.2ghz.


An additional piece of info:

I ran furmark with prime95 and the voltage to the cpu was fluctuating a lot and dropped to 1.26! (vid is 1.32) as was the 12v rail which dipped below 12v. But it survived for quite a while, then the electricity breaker in the house switched. I have no idea if it was casued it, someone had just plugged something else in at the same time in a socket which is often temperamental. It rebooted normally afterwards with the overclock still in tact.

I should be able to swap out the gpu cards this evening so will be able to compare the voltages and see if I get a higher overclock. Obviously it would not help me much if it overclocks more with a 7600 but at least I'd know something! I might be using leftover bits to put a spare system so when getting a psu for that I could do a bit of swapping. Certainly wouldn't buy one just for a few 100 mhz though.

Cheers