Overclocking Intel’s Q9550s with Cooler Master Hyper N520 . . . Part One of “Quad Core vs Dual Core” Shootout

Welcome to the latest in our series of continual hardware shootouts. This time it is CPU vs CPU, but it is presented as very gaming-related.  Here we give you a battle of overclocking Intel’s popular Core 2 Duo, E8600 vs. Core 2 Quad Q9550S; dual core vs quad core – for gaming. We have decided to break our extensive review into several standalone but related sections that are easy to navigate. Up-until-now, we have depended on our Core 2 Duo E8600 at 4 Ghz to set the benchmarks for our video cards. But now Intel has graciously provided AlienBabelTech an engineering sample of Q9550S – their new low power Core 2 Quad stock-clocked at 2.83 Ghz!

We thank Intel for Q9550S and we will put it to good use for our readers in finally attempting to answer the question: Is a quad core CPU really necessary to get the best out of today’s newer PC games – even with a powerful graphics processor? Until recently, the answer was in doubt as the Core 2 Duo processors are clocked higher than their Core 2 Quad counterparts and often they would get a much higher overclock than the warmer-running quad core CPUs.  By serendipity, the very same week, Cooler Master also kindly provided ABT with their basic universal CPU cooler, Hyper N520! So we thank our HW vendors and we immediately put them both into service for testing for our readers, last weekend. Clearly one of the first questions that is asked of any hardware enthusiast with a brand new CPU is, “how well does it overclock?”. To be responsible, we first spent nearly a week with Intel’s Q9550S, first at stock and then at “mild” overclocks to get a feel for the new CPU and to know how it performs before we even started with the torture testing and going for it’s maximum overclock at up to Intel’s maximum recommended voltage of 1.3625 volts.  Later on, in the second and third parts of this series, we want to know what effect overclocking the CPU has on graphics performance and ultimately how it affects the frame rates of the games we play.  So it is very important to first be sure of stability and test Q9550S overclocks as we proceed to incrementally raise our its core speed on the way to 4 Ghz; our minimum target so as to compare with months of E8600 benchmarks we already set for you at that speed.

The dual cooling fans move a lot of air

For this overclocking section of our review, we will be cooling Q9550S with the newly released Cooler Master Hyper N520 as well as our old Thermalright CPU cooler we use as a standard, since we have many months of overclocking experience with it. We are going to give your our method and notes as we installed this cooler and tested it to see what Intel’s Q9550s will overclock stably to at no more than Intel’s recommended maximum voltage.  We use the very latest version of Core Temp to compare temperatures for all of our testing.