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

Setting Q9550S overclock with Cooler Master Hyper N520

-The Overclock and Conclusions

First of all, the airflow is excellent.  You can of course install Cooler Master’s Hyper N520 to pull air from the back of your case or from the front.

As noted before, the fans are quiet and the hum is not annoying and is barely heard over my quiet PS fan – never mind my GTX280 which is more noticeable audibly.  Of course, I have my case open and it is still not a problem.  Temperatures are excellent.  At stock, they are in the very lowest 30s C in my very warm room.  It is important to take into consideration the ambient temperatures of the room where the testing took place – especially for air-cooling.  Here in the Southern California high desert, we have had only had only a little taste of Winter and temperatures for the past week have been in the 70sF outside and quite warm in the test room.  There is a lot of difference, for example, with the extremes of an overclocker in Hawaii contrasted to one in an ice igloo in Alaska.

At any rate, temperatures of Q9550S at stock clocks and voltage were quite cool with Cooler Master Hyper N520 and totally comparable to the more expensive Thermalright/Scythe CPU cooler which is just keeping our CPU the next notch cooler.  There were no big temperature spikes, even alt+tab’ing out of games in intense firefights.  This is a testament both to Intel’s new cooler-running, more energy-efficient Q9550S and Cooler Master’s Hyper n520 to keep a quad core CPU so cool.  So let’s start overclocking Q9550S with our new CPU cooler.  We are just going to give you the shortened “cliff’s notes” condensed version of our many hours of setting and testing overclocks.

Basically, we were able to overclock Q9550S from 2.83 Ghz at stock to FSB 400 – where DDR800 is rated for at stock speeds – to 3.4Ghz without moving any other setting in BIOS except RAM:CPU dividers from “Auto” !  And there were almost imperceptable temperature rises with Coolermaster Hyper n520 at idle and barely significant when fully loaded.  Both Intel’s Q9550S and Cooler Master’s Hyper N520 easily pass at 3.4 Ghz.  Notching up to 425 FSB – 3.62 Ghz – is where we are first required to go to manual and set the voltage so that it is no longer “auto”.  We recommend doing this as “auto” will sometimes oversupply the CPU with voltage in an overclocked situation.  However, when Intel gives a range up to 1.3625v, they really do not intend that you run it there 24/7.  So you really need to stay on top of your temperatures when you start to approach the 45nm CPU’s VID maximum specified voltage if you do not want premature CPU failure.  We also ran tests with our HD4870 with Q9550S at 2.83 Ghz and 3.6 Ghz and our GTX280 with Q9550s at 2.83 Ghz, 3.4 Ghz and 4.0 Ghz its maximum final stable overclock at maximum specified voltage.

In each case, our Cooler Master Hyper N520 was completely up to the task of cooling Intel’s Q9550S at 4.0 Ghz even under extreme load.  We found that quite impressive for a basic cooler that a budget-minded enthusiast would like.  It was still slightly warmer than the more expensive Thermalright/Scythe120 combination but well within the safety range of 70C temperature spikes.  We never saw any big spikes in temperatures as measured by Core Temp that was anywhere near Intel’s maximum T-Junction of 100C – or even 80C, depending on how it is measured.  If you are not an extreme overclocker and do not swap out your CPUs or remove your CPU cooler regularly, then Cooler Master’s Hyper N520 deserves serious consideration for a place in your case. This editor awards it 4/5 Stars – recommended as an excellently-priced basic universal CPU cooler to even keep your quad core CPU cool at a solid overclock.  Did we mention it was really quiet?

Summary: 4/5 stars for Cooler Master Hyper n520 Universal CPU cooler

The Pros:

• The price is excellent for a basic universal CPU cooler.
• The instructions are clear and it is packed well.
• All the necessary hardware is supplied, except for the screwdriver.
• The dual fans work well together for its small footprint and the noise level is good.  It is quiet and cool under load for any moderately overclocked CPU.
• It cools an overclocked and fully loaded Q9550S at its maximum overclock at maximum voltage to stay within the safety range.

The Cons:

• Thermal paste does not spread easily and tends to cake.
• If you remove your CPU for any reason, or your Hyper N520, you must remove your motherboard in most cases.

Cooler Master Hyper N520 gets AlienBabelTech.com’s “Highly Recommended” for its class if our minor cons do not specifically apply to your situation.  After having spent ten days testing both Intel’s Q9550S and Cooler Master’s Hyper N520 we feel we can make these recommendations and ratings for you.  Of course, this Part I is only the brief introduction to Q9550S vs. E8600, so we will have much opportunity to demonstrate the whys and how we came to our conclusions as presented here now.

Summary: 4.5/5 stars for Intel Q9550S Core 2 Quad CPU

The Pros:

• Q9550S runs cool and overclocks very well.  An extraordinary quad core CPU.
• It takes less energy at stock – 65w vs. 95 w TDP for ‘non-S’ Q9550
• Intel’s Q9550S or other S-Quad would be the perfect choice for a rackmount OEM system builder who requires stable, cool and quiet quad core CPUs
• Q9550S is likely to be a consistently solid overclocker but not necessarily much better than past E0 stepping.  It might be one of the better overclocking bets in the future.

The Cons:

• None – only the premium price over the ‘non-S’ Q9550 might be an issue for some, or as an alternative, you may want to choose the more expensive Core i7 platform for absolutely no-compromise maximum performance.

Intel’s Q9550S gets our “Editor’s choice” and is “highly recommended” for all Penryn platforms.

Future Testing of Q9550S

We are certainly not done with Q9550S nor with using Cooler Master’s Hyper N520 to cool it.  In fact, we at ABT have just begun to scratch the surface in examining quad core gaming vs. dual core using overclocked Q9550S vs. E8600.   All the testing is done already for Part II which is going to be quite detailed as we first examine our mini-suite of 2 single video cards – GTX280 and HD4870 – coupled with 8 intensive benchmarks which feature 6 very new PC games.  Part III takes it even a step futher by adding multi-GPU to the mix as we use our full 15-game benchmarking suite to finally settle the question: “Is quad core necessary for today’s PC games?” as we set quad core head-to-head with dual core.

Here is a tease from our next upcoming article that you can expect this week; just one example from 3DMark06‘s stock benchmark using Q9550S with 2 powerful single-GPU video cards, GTX280 and HD4870-1GB:

• GTX280’s score at 2.83 Ghz is 14907
• GTX280’s score at 3.40 Ghz is 17906
• GTX280’s score at 4.00 Ghz is 18167

• HD4870’s score at 2.83 Ghz is 14411
• HD4870’s score at 3.60 Ghz is 15825
• HD4870’s score at 4.00 Ghz is 16067

We note the scaling with Q9550S and especially GTX280’s increased score is impressive just moving to 3.40 Ghz from its stock clock of 2.83 Ghz; yet not so much moving from 3.4Ghz to 4.0 Ghz.  Does this mean anything?  Can we expect similar scaling in actually playing PC games?  Well, no – and, no.  Stay tuned for answers in the rest of this series featuring Intel’s Core 2 Quad Q9550S.  Expect it this week.  In the meantime, we are still testing Q9550S against E8600.  If there is something you would like to see us explore further for testing and later publication, let us know in the comments below or feel free to join AlienBabelTech forums here.

Mark Poppin

ABT editor

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