Progress Report: Overclocking Intel’s Core 2 Quad 9550S with Cooler Master Hyper n520

It is a rare thing in life to have excellent timing and I really appreciate when it happens.  This very last week at ABT Hardware HQ, we got two very timely and rather related HW products to review almost together.  We received Intel’s new 65w Core 2 Quad CPU, Q9550-s and Cooler Master’s new dual-fan universal CPU cooler – Hyper n520.   A brand new CPU and a brand new CPU cooler!  We have been really busy playing with them and testing them ever since, and I figure I personally have well over 60 hours into benchmarking – just since Friday through tonight, Tuesday evening!  I have to admit that it has become an obsession with me – just like playing a great video game for endless hours while almost completely oblivious to all else – just to find out how it turns out.  We have been preparing for our adventure by charting the performance differences for you with our Core 2 Duo E8600 at 3.99 Ghz and then again at 4.25 Ghz which is a very nice overclock from its stock clock of 3.33 Ghz.  We will show you how much practical performance difference the additional +260Mhz makes in the actual frame rates of a game you may be playing as we have been consistently benchmarking at 3.99 Ghz with our E8600 through all of our testing and across all platforms since we launched ABT, last October.

Here is a pic of what we will use to cool our Core 2 Quad, Cooler Master’s Hyper n520.  The twin fans appear to have good free air flow for maximum cooling.

Of course, Q9550S is still 2.83Ghz E0 stepping with the main change being that its TDP is lower; the new Core 2 Quads – Q9550S, Q9400S and Q8200S  – are all 65W TDP quad-core CPUs. This means they share the same specififications as the older non-S quads with the only difference being – instead of 95W TDP parts – these CPUs are reduced to 65w by dropping their core voltage. Thirty watts is probably not a significant energy savings especially for those of us enthusiasts with a single PC and a multi-GPU setup, but Q9550S is particularly well-suited for OEMs that specialize in cooler running CPUs for rackmounted servers.  They are usually glad to pay a premium for this type of CPU and Q9550S is also considerably more expensive – about $100 more than the regular non-S versions – and even more so than Intel’s entry level i7 CPU.  Of course, we will look carefully at its value for us gamers as compared to the non-S versions, but also to the bigger question if quad core is “worth it” over dual core CPUs for gaming as generally the dual cores overclock a little better.  Also, we may speculate that the ‘S’ quads are picked from the center of the die where the higher binned and more expensive parts are generally chosen from so they can be validated to run at the lower voltage and may be slightly more uniform overall in overclocking well.

To properly compare our new Q9550S Intel Core 2 Quad against our Core 2 Duo E8600, we have created an expanded and improved 14-game benchmark suite for you that we have just put E8600 through and now Q9550-S is being tested under identical conditions.  We are glad to report that we got our Q9550S up from its stock clock of 2.83Ghz to over 3.6Ghz on stock VID [2.175v] as reported by Core Temp and with temperatures in the low 30sC.  However, going further requires more voltage.  We have  been notching it up for the last few hours, +1 FSB at a time.  Each stage where it exhibits instability, we notch the voltage up and note it.  This is a very nice CPU that responds very well to slight voltage increases. We are finally at 3.99 Ghz, right now – 469 x 8.5 FSB – where we are testing it for stability and it appears to be passing with flying colors, and where it also appears to be its maximum overclock with 1.344v VID.  Where it stands, it will be a perfect comparison between overclocked dual-core and overclocked quad-core for gaming with both E8600 and Q9550S at 3.99Ghz.  In this manner, we give you the full quad- vs. dual-core comparison in today’s modern PC games so we can see the potential advantages of the “extra” two cores.  We have been dying to answer the following question to ourselves for a long time, “Is it worth it now to upgrade from a fast dual core to a quad core for playing today’s video games at 1920×1200 and 1680×1050 resolutions with max detail?”

Of course, this is going to be one heck of a detailed review to really attempt to answer that question and it continues our theme of finding the best bang-for-buck PC hardware for gaming for all of us.  So we naturally need to begin with finding the highest practical Q9550S OC so that we can compare it with our E8600.  Our first review – Part One, “Overclocking Intel’s Q9550S with Cooler Master Hyper n520” – sets the benchmarks for Q9550 by using our mini-game suite of 7 game-only benchmarks to determine its stability and how well it scales as it goes from stock to 3.6 and then to its maximum overclock at 3.99Ghz.  This is where our Cooler Master N520 CPU cooler comes in. We always look forward to new products from Cooler Master because, well … they are cool and definitely give us great bang for our HW dollar.  This Hyper n520 is a budget-priced universal dual-fan CPU cooler that looks like it could really perform well, so we test it against our current, more expensive CPU cooler with one 120 MM fan.

So stay tuned.  There is a LOT coming from us, both this and next week.  You can expect us to publish our benchmark and chart completed “GPU shootout”, Part 4 – The Summary. In this part, we continue on with our X48 mother board after realizing that P35’s PCIe 1.1 slot and 16x+4x Crossfire slots, held us back with even a 4870 class card.  For our summary, we test 8 sets of drivers .. 4 each from Nvidia and ATi, from September to the current ones with 4870, 4870-X2, 4870 CrossfireX-3, and GTX280.  Then we introduce our Q9550s  “quad core in gaming series”,  where we use our Cooler Master Hyper n520 to set the maximum overclocks and set the stage for our showdown with Intel’s fastest dual-core CPU on the Penryn Platform, E8600 in Parts 2 and 3.  We will not attempt to compare them at stock as it has been done to death, elsewhere.  We prefer to test them both at overclocked speeds and we will ultimately attempt to determine if an upgrade from dual- to quad-core for gaming is necessary now.  Also, you have to realize that this benchmarking takes a lot of time, especially as they are run a number of times to eliminate chances of error and also across multiple configurations at two popular and demanding wide screen resolutions, 1920×1200 and 1680×1050.  For example, Clear Sky’s official Benchmark takes about 12 minutes to run once.  Run it 4 times and it is an hour (2 times for accuracy on 2 resolutions]; run it on all 4 video cards and it is 4 hours! … Now do that each at 3.99 Ghz and 4.25Ghz; and again for the second CPU and a day is gone!!  And we have 16 detailed benchmarks to analyze with you.

These are really fun times for us and we will have results and our reviews posted very soon.  In the meantime, we are always open to suggestions and what you would like to see us research and test for you.  Please feel free to reply in the comments section, or post in our ABT Forums where we are always glad to respond to our readers.  In the meantime, happy gaming!  We are back to benching and eager to bring your our results!

Mark Poppin

ABT Editor