3DMarks, 8800GTX and E6400 - My OC results

Let me say first, this was all done on Windows Vista x64 with the Nvidia 100.59 drivers, so it's probably not comparable to XP results. The scores could be lower because of the mature XP drivers and the beta status of the Vista ones. But that's not the point anyway, I was just measuring performance increases with different settings. RAM timings haven't been changed during the tests and the gfx card fan was set to 100% with nTune.

I didn't bother to make benchmarks with stock CPU settings

Setting 1: E6400 @ 3.2 Ghz (8x400) + 8800GTX stock 575/1350/1800

3DMark 06: 10750 (=100%)
3DMark 03: 34921 (=100%)

Setting 2: E6400 @ 3.2 Ghz (8x400) + 8800GTX 625/1550/1900

3DMark 06: 11430 (=106.33%)
3DMark 03: 37371 (=107.22%)

Setting 3: E6400 @ 3.2 Ghz (8x400) + 8800GTX 625/1550/2000

3DMark 06: 11539 (=107.34%)
3DMark 03: 37810 (=108.27%)

That is as far as I overclocked my 8800GTX, the core may have a couple of Mhz more in it, but I stopped there. Then I increased the FSB and thus made the CPU and the RAM faster.

Setting 4: E6400 @ 3.4 Ghz (8x425) + 8800GTX 625/1550/2000

3DMark 06: 11769 (=109.48%)
3DMark 03: 38324 (=109.74%)

Setting 5: E6400 @ 3.6 Ghz (8x450) + 8800GTX 625/1550/2000

3DMark 06: 11910 (=110.79%)
3DMark 03: 38537 (=110.35%)

I have more detailed data as well, but I will put that in some kind of article. Just thought you might be interested in these raw results. When my Q6600 arrives, I will run more benchmarks and then put them in my article.

Edit: Ok ok ok, you asked me to go for 12k...

Setting 6: E6400 @ 3.6 Ghz (8x450) + 8800GTZ 650/1550/2000

3DMark 06: 12129 (=112.83%)
3DMark 03: 39444 (=112.95%)

Now don't ask me and try to get 40k at 3DMark03...

Why try for 12k? Hey, I'm not obsessed with numbers at all... erm.. wait... *looks at the huge array of benchmark scores his excel sheet* well... never mind.

Update (Setting 6 for 3Dmark06 fetishism reasons)

This is with the 8800GTX at 600/1500/1900 btw., so it's not the highest overclock. Also memory is just running at 736 Mhz, much lower than it was when overclocking my E6400. And still... impressive.

You can see the the temps of the CPU during the whole 3DMark06 in the Speedfan charts. This version of Speedfan (I'm registered in the beta testing) reads the temp directly from the cores, just like CoreTemp claims to do. I bypassed the power control of the TEC within the Titan Amanda Cooler and feed it directly with 12V, which has improved the cooling by quite a margin!

I broke 13k

First, max. overclock of my 8800GTX with the Quad at 3 Ghz (to remove the CPU from being a possible problem in that benchmark)



Then, my max. stable Quad overclock together with the max. stable 8800GTX overclock:



This is a worthy end of my benchmark sessions.

Hi

1. No, I am using a Titan Amanda cooler, where I have disconnected the TEC power cable from the PCI control card and feed it with 12V directly. There's no danger of condensation with THAT cpu.
2. Yes, I had. 1.525v for 3.33 Ghz. 1.5v for 3.2 Ghz. That needs a very good cooler and I am in the 80+C area using 4x Prime95 or OCCT for an hour. But it's the 2nd core needing that much juice, I can go to 3.2 Ghz with 1.4v and all but the 2nd core are primestable
3. I flashed the BIOS a lot of times, slowly raising the settings. NiBiTor for changing the BIOS, nvflash for backing it up and then flashing the modified ones. And because I only have NTFS harddisks, I used the Ultimate Boot CD (freeware) with NTFS4DOS to boot into DOS with access to my harddisks, flashing from there.
4. The 8800GTX was flashed to 650 core, 1550 stream processors, 1000 (2000) RAM. But 12500 in 3DMark seems ok to me if you didn't overclock.

There seems to be a problem with higher FSB and the quad cores. With a QX6700 you can bypass them with a higher multi, but we with a Q6600 are stuck with 9 at max. My board and memory could do 450 FSB (x2 =900 RAM) easily with my E6400, but I have stability problems with anything above 370FSB and in fact can't even post with FSB400, even with a multiplier set to 6...