I have read speculations before its launch time that the new 45nm processors are going to be easy over clocking. So after I built the new machine, I decided to give it a try.
Since I have never been a fan of overclocking, and non of the component was chosen for such a purpose, I wasn’t keeping my hope high at all. As it turned out however, Q9450 seemed to overclock extremely well. By just bumping FSB from 333 MHz to 400 MHz, I was able to run it at 3.2 GHz without any issues. That’s a 20% jump and is quite impressive. What is more impressive is that this is achieved with mostly main steam components: ASUS P5E with 8GB (4GBx2) G.SKILL F2-6400CL5D-4GBPQ, Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro. Even though I did not use Intel’s stock cooler, Arctic Freezer 7 is by no means a massive cooling solution and I am confident that Q9450 is able to achieve this frequency with the default heat sink as well.
Without any voltage adjustment, I was only able to bring it to a maximum FSB of 430 MHz (3.44 GHz). At 440 MHz (3.52 GHz) I was able to boot but the system became somewhat unstable. I think more or less this was due to the fact that the DDR2-800 RAM was 10% overclocked at that point.
Given the above preliminary results, I am pretty sure that going above 4 GHz is definitely achievable with proper cooling and better RAM.
