So I dropped my Q6600 into my old gigabyte P965G motherboard and jumped up to 8GB of DDR2 800 MHz RAM to go with it. I also swapped video cards from my old 9600GSO to an 8800GT.
With my old 4GB RAM I had a hard time getting a stable overclock, so I ended up back at stock speeds. But the new RAM seems to overclock much better. I didn't spend much time playing with it - but just bumping the FSB clock speed from 266MHz to 300 MHz moved me from 2.4GHz on the Q6600 to 2.7GHz and the RAM went from 800MHz to 900MHz. I'll probably play with it a bit more tonight and see if I can get up to 3.0GHz with the stock HSF. But I'm a bit concerned about cooling.
My motherboard only has fan headers for 1 case fan. The case itself actually came with 2 fans (1 in the front, 1 in the back), but I could only hook one of them up straight to the pins on the motherboard - so I went with the one in the back. That didn't bug me back when I had my old E6300 (dual core 1.86GHz) in the case. But I think OCing the Q6600 and multiboxing will be generating a lot more heat. The old 9600GSO actually took up 2 expansion card slots and it's fan pulled air in the case and blew it out the back as well. The 8800GT is only a single slot card so it both pulls and vents its air to/from the inside of the case. :(
Is there any simple way to buy a splitter and plug in the 2nd fan? I was looking at some of the PCIe fans as well, but it looks like those all come with a 3 or 4 wire pin to draw power. I thought they used to make adapters that would let you plug some fans into your old 4-wire power connectors (the ones we used to use for IDE HDD's and CD-ROMs). Any other suggestions?
