I know a better way to spend 1000$...

Great guide, guys!

Over at anandtech they did a little work with overclocking the uncore (http://www.anandtech.com/...intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3453) but didn't see much impact in real-world testing.

Different memory speeds/timings also don't seem to make much difference to system performance in real-world testing.

I'm curious how much difference the QPI makes when overclocked.

Grats for the article. Great Job!

This is what tech sites should be all about.

Now, when is the SFF X58 going to go retail...hmm

Hey, first of all, great guide. There is one thing you left out that will kill your overclock. It is called the CPU clock scew. Google it and it will amaze you, I'm just to lazy to describe it. Right now I am running 4.0Ghz on a foxconn Bloodrage with a block of 190. I have ocz ram 6gig rated for 1600 at 1524 but with the 7,7,7,20,1T timmings, 1.65 volts. I am running it 24/7, water cooled at 50c idle 60c load. my block is 1.35v. my pll is 1.898v. my QPI is just over 3.4ghz. My NB frequency is just over 3.0ghz. And in all, in 3D Mark Vantage I'm getting a score of 55,000 for the cpu, in all settings.

on that previous comment, getting 55,000 in all setting was wrong. That was in the low setting. sorry. I also reajusted my timings again. blck is 180. 20x cpu, 20x QPI, 10x mem, and all the voltages were lowered somewhat. I did this to lower temps and raise mem speeds. All I had to do diff was to change my mem specs. my temps now are 40c to 55c. good luck to all.

You said a follow up article was on the way. Did I miss it? It has been over a year....

I still can't understand going with anything other than 1366, 3.8 solid with air.
and down the road OC your Core i9 on the same board.
I know saving money is good but your not saving if you go cheap now just to spend more later when you can't reuse the hardware you buy now.

Wow, fantastic write up. Very detailed and helpful. However, I'm starting to get the feeling with ASUS that they are trying to make it as easy as possible without doing anything technical. Or even turning off turbo, or speed step etc.

I got an asus P6 and P6 SE. And over clocked both. I decided to just try a straight approach with nothing fancy and got it to 3.8ghz very easily. First went for 3.6GHZ. I set BCLK to 172 and cpu voltage to 1.125 and it passed prime and stability tests for 24 hours. However one web site with a flash player made it crash. So I changed up to 1.13475 and it was perfect. Then I went 3.8GHZ and set bclk to 180 (nearly 3.8ghz) and cpu voltage to 1.16875. I never disabled speed step or turbo. I wanted to see what Asus would do. The idea was to have it overclocked at a lower speed when idle, but it would then jump up to my target when under load. And any kind of load does cause programs to show its at 3.6ghz or 3.8ghz as I thought.

And the results were NO problems! No over heating either. In a 70 F (21.1 c )degree room, it never gets over 147 F at 3.6ghz. (using core temp and real temp) OR never exceeding 153 F at 3.8ghz. That's 63.8 c at 3.6ghz, and 67 c at 3.8ghz using a Dark Knight cooler.

I have a lot of respect for pro over clockers, but this is the 2nd time I got incredible results with Asus just leaving everything on AUTO and raising the Bclk and adjusting voltages. Also I read another web site where they do overclocking. Not sure where, (Toms?), but they got their best results with TurboV etc, LOL. Maybe you should just try it that way. I did start in BIOS however. But ended up tweaking extra in widnows. I ended up with the same thing you got, with lower voltages and less heat. And I'd bet in benchmarks and running applications, mine would either be the same or very, very close in performance. But again, great write up and fun to read. Thanks.