I'm looking into buying the intel Q6600 when the price drop comes in and pushes it below 300. However, my current system works pretty well under the E6600's TDP of 65W. My primary issues in this upgrade are cooling and power savings, along with tweaking my mainboard so i can take full advantage of all 4 cores.
My stable idle temps are ~33C, 100% CPU temps are 38-42C. I'm using an Evercool 200W watercooling kit, and so far i'm pretty pleased with that.
So what i thought i could do was to tweak the multiplier of the Q6600, from 9 to 6, and raise my FSB from 266 to 400 and add some voltage to compensate, all in all that should only effect my board temps. This should allow my motherboard to feed my CPU for CPU hungry tasks. However, this presents a new problem in that since i've already dropped my multiplier to 6x, how can speed stepping come in and drop my multiplier when i'm not using my CPU to the max?
If i'm running at 2.4Ghz, all the time, i'll be wasting power and spitting out heat, and to be honost i don't think this water cooling kit can handle a 105W TDP chip. I'll probably see 40C temps at idle and at least 50-55C at 100% load, that being said on a 65C max temp chip, that's calling it a little to close for my tastes.
So what i'd like to know is, is there a way to configure my system without buying a fan based heatsink, so that i can see better temps, right now i can probably get better thermal performance by reversing my radiator to blow in, but that will need some pliers to get the radiator in the right configuration. And secondly, will speed step still function if i drop the multiplier and up the FSB. This is important since i'd like the FSB to have more bandwidth to feed 4 cores, not that i have a huge problem running at the default if it will save me lots of temp. But i'd rather see 80% performance boost, than a meager 40% because of FSB bottlenecking.
Advice/suggestions?
