sweet man! now overclock that card, push for higher memory, it does wonders for the card. using msi afterburner and have the voltage +12, power limit 115, core clock +50 (should put your boost speeds right around 1241) and memory +500 (7ghz effective). Not saying just throw those settings on, but you should be able to get a pretty good oc out of it, we have the exact same card and it stays pretty quiet, even with a solid OC on it. Good luck and have fun with it.
Thanks man! New best after overclocking GPU: http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/7791129 I'll tweak the CPU overclock tomorrow an see if I can't get over 8000.
I haven't really pushed it much yet. I just went ahead with the settings you said, so power limit 115, core clock +50 and memory +500. I didn't raze the voltage though.
Oh, by the way. I ran Pass mark performance test and the CPU mark came out at 6213. A 2500 at stock came out at 6203 here: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html 2500K is a bit higher at 6,457 So in that benchmark at least they are close, very close.
Passmark is an irrelevant test kind of like WEI. Take it from a person with 2500k 2600k and a qx9650 at 4ghz. You are like 5 sockets behind. 1366 1156 1155 1150 2011.
3 sockets. You can't really count 1366 and 2011 as they are not replacements for LGA775, they are replacements for LGA771. Anyway, I'm still waiting for the next big leap in performance. Somehow I think I'll be waiting a long time. New architectures just seem like tweaks nowadays. Remember how big a leap Core 2 was over Netburst and how P6 was over P5, 486 and so on. When I am no longer able to play games at decent FPS, that's when I'll upgrade. My Q9650 is still a capable of 60FPS+ in all games 6 years after I bought it. Ok, I have to turn down a few settings sometimes to get 60FPS but at the end of the day better graphics don't make a better game... a keyboard and mouse make a better game!
Where you'll notice alot of difference in the newer processors (sandybridge onwards) compared to your Q9650 is minimum framerates, giving you a much smoother overall experience. Also, you're comparing your overclocked G9650 to a stock 2500/2500K. Most people run their 2500K at 4.4Ghz+, giving a significant boost.
Q9650 is still a descent CPU to game with, there is another issue with new CPU's, new single GPU's bottleneck them, but as I recall the Q9650 also bottlenecks Nvidia series 500 and up, even the i7 900 series is slowing performance down. http://www.3dmark.com/compare/3dm11/7791129/3dm11/6675293 Going to bench my current setup later today, but I certainly think your CPU is bottlenecking that card, since your not that much above i2600k @ stock with GTX580. Compared vs. your system, MVP disabled, CPU and GPU @ stock http://www.3dmark.com/compare/3dm11/7788061/3dm11/7974266 Compared with and without MVP on own system, CPU and GPU @ stock http://www.3dmark.com/compare/3dm11/7974266/3dm11/7974196 Although you will see the greatest difference when using SLI/CFX setups. I mainly upgraded back then to get faster SATA and CPU performance in other applications, gaming is also smoother with higher SSD I/O. Found an interesting comparison between 3 generations of i7 CPU's btw. http://www.ocaholic.ch/modules/smartsection/item.php?page=0&itemid=1164
After seeing those results I decided to rise to the challenge and see if I could eek out any more performance. So I dusted off my overclocking overalls and see how far I could push it. I have to say my particular q9650 has always been a bit of a voltage pig, not the worst, but not great either. I managed to get 4.16GHz fully stable after an hour of tweaking. I could probably go higher and do further tweaks to memory timings and speed but for now this will do. As for my GTX 760, I think I've been really lucky with this one as I managed to obtain an 90MHz overclock on the core and 550MHz overclock on the memory with no increase in voltage! I went as high as I could with the core before artefacts which started at +95mhz but I'm sure there is still room for improvement in the memory. Anyway here are the results! http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/7974874 I think I managed to get the highest ever score using a Q9650 and a GTX 760 which is pretty cool. I did the same with the Q9650 and my GTX460 too a while back. Here are the exact settings: Fantastic: http://www.3dmark.com/compare/3dm11/6675293/3dm11/7974874
Your comparing it to my GTX 660 @stock there Also, you do know that the 2600k can be cranked up to around 5Ghz and still be stable? Anyway, the Q9650 is still a very valid CPU for gaming, even if it bottlenecks newer GPU's. As long as games run smooth enough for you there is no point in upgrading to something newer. EDIT: 4.6Ghz doesn't add much MVP enabled: http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/7977331 MVP disabled: http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/7977367
Interesting thread. My rigs nearly 6 years old and like SirGalahads. X38 mobo is just way past its sell by. Has served well as a gaming rig for SupComFAF StarCraft2 KerbalSP etc on a CRT at 1600x1200. But I backed some kickstarters like Elite and Star Citizen and the alphas are chugging. Planning a new build but with Haswell refresh, E & Broadwell options coming soon I am wondering if I could squeeze another year out of it with a GTX 760 or I could save the money and go with the Haswell refresh and 9 chipset in a month or two or get a 4770k now and get on with it. Decisions! Anyway this thread helped as I realised the old girl is bottlenecked, was thinking about a 770 as its the best bang for buck out there, but now I see that would be wasting money on this mobo. :nerd:
Have you overclocked your QX9650? Your mobo is pretty nice to be honest, should be able to get 4GHz with decent cooling. Although the QX9650 doesn't overclock as well as the Q9650 due to its older stepping.
I bought the QX9650 fully intending to clock it. It is clocked at 3.2 now and it should go higher on the same FSB with a Noctua NH C14 which works a treat, but its not CPU bound so no need. I read about the hafnium process migration issues at high volts so have been keeping it low, was expensive so I wanted it to last. It has been such a pain to get stable though. To explain, it was the mobo either underclocking itself a lot at stock clocks & auto or when "corrected" was unstable at first due to a combination of a northbridge which goes nuts over 46°C (X38 is known to run hot but this one also seems unstable when hot and now has oil cooling ~ because the fusion block was corroding with water containing copper sulphate yadda yadda ~ with dedicated 120 rad loop and I have to keep volts low or it just blue screens), also very finicky memory timings, probably related to the NB problem. I probably should have RMAd it but thought it was my fault for not understanding the BIOS for a long while, tbh I hadnt got a clue wtf I was doing! Thought it would be a learning experience. Started out borrowing settings from Anandtech. In the end there was one key setting "row refresh recycle time" which needed to be 100+ to get memory running OK, auto wouldn't work and Anand suggested 60, no way. It will boot at lower settings yes but if you run memtest overnight it throws up a dozen errors and crashes every so often in use. Also had to get Asus to fix their BIOS at one point. I think they used the expert thing as an excuse to not bother with getting the auto settings right. Its the last time I get RoG for sure. Just didnt work right from day one. I had done a half dozen builds before this one for myself and family and a few since and none of them were even close to the kind of foul ups I got from these BIOSs. I can now raise the cpu multiplier anytime but it would not help the memory bandwidth which is the main bottleneck. If I try to push FSB and NB volts the NB overheats and screws up. I could drop the NB strap to raise FSB but then I seem to recall it didnt help much. So I let it be, frankly I got fed up with it. One option would have been to rip out the NB SB and mosfet coolers and instal a liquid loop with better NB cooling but since I think the chip is dodgy I didnt think it was worth it, good money after bad. I did remove the stock thermal compound and add Arctic silver which helped but not enough. I was going to ditch it but after years of tweaking got it to run memtest 24/7 without errors and as new hardware costs money I decided to think of it as a victory and have been biding my time. It has been stable since then. I may be missing something with the NB as there are a hell of a lot of settings but I have tweaked and crashed it so many times I just cannot be bothered any more, it will be a lot less trouble to do a fresh build!
Sounds like a nightmare of a board you have. I haven't had any issues with my Asus Rampage, also a ROG board.
Sorry, I dont want to derail your thread, but yes it was a nighmare. Trouble with auto for both the QX and the DDR3. Though the OCZ ram I was using (since junked, one dodgy stick) was a complicating factor. Asus were good and issued a fix when I contacted them about a BIOS bug with the QX. There is a possibility with the oil cooling in place to push through the NB heat instabilty with some major volts, but not sure how long it would last, max recommended is 1.49v but Anand were looking at 1.65v. Might try again... ! Would be nice to "win" But back on topic, any difference to memory bandwidth and therefore graphics card options will be minimal cf upgrade. SiSoft Sandra shows memory bandwidth is currently 8.16Gb/s which is peanuts compared even to ivy bridge which has 20+ Gb/s vanilla and E is double that. If I clock the FSB to 500 it is still only going to be 10Gb/s, not enough for a 770 I am guessing. Time for a new one !
