I’ve bumped the system up to 400mHz FSB so I’m able to clock in at 3.2 at this point. I’m going to do some attempts at 420 after running at 400 for a few days and until I get my new RAM. I wanted to upgrade to 4GB of RAM and was looking at adding 2 more sticks of the Ballistix but rather than dropping $80 with a rebate for $25-30 I picked up 2x2GB of G-Skill for $80 shipped (no rebates) that seemed to be doing well with overclocking. So I am able to keep it to 2 sticks and only pay about $25-30 more and sell off the 2x1GB 1066′s or sell them with the E6600/P5W system. We’ll see how it does with the Maximus Formula but I as I said I’d rather run 2 sticks than 4 and it runs at a lower voltage than the Crucial.

The only thing I am concerned with at the moment is the north bridge temperatures which stays over 50c even at 333FSB but doesn’t go above 60c even at full load (4 Prime95′s running on each affinity).  With it set at 400fsb and idle it’s 55c and still only goes up to around 60c on load.  My other concern is that the DRAM voltage (even set to 2.22v in BIOS) is showing 2.27v in Asus Probe II and the DRAM Ref is at 1.14v.  I’m hoping the new RAM will correct this but I need to do some posting on the NB temps.

At the present my 3DMark scores are up from 13,803 with the E6600/P5W to 17,552 (~22% increase) with the Q9450/Maximus Formula so I’m happy with the upgrade at this point. I can tell a difference in some apps like Photoshop on load times.

I ran 3DMark @1920×1200 and got the UPS beeping again, so it looks like I’m going to move the monitor to a normal surge for now and just pick up a second UPS for the monitor, residential gateway, switch and speakers since most of it’s just on a normal surge now.

The other thing that was kind of wild is watching 3DMark06 and seeing the speeds and remembering my original test that netted me a whopping 1,579 on my AMD 3500+ (non-64) with the x800 Pro! Still not bought Advantage that just released and not sure if I will in the foreseeable future. I’ll probably look at upgrading next year when the new Intel sockets are released and I do a full system overhaul…then again this upgrade felt that way on my wallet with the board/memory/proc weighing in at about $670 and video cards around $500 earlier this year.

Edit: UPS probable fix. I think I found what has been causing the beeping and I assume it’s the load on the battery. I had the normal surge protector on one of the battery plugs. What I assume is causing the issue is the Residential Gateway since (I’m guessing) the beeping started occurring after I got AT&T UVerse and probably about the time I got the 3870s (which is what baffled me before)…so it must have put an additional load (over the previously installed cable modem) on the UPS that it’s overloading the battery. I haven’t had an issue but then again power has been fine so far this year but summer is coming when I enjoy occasional outages. So my original idea of moving everything to a new one will still be the final plan.

I gave 410FSB a try as well and it didn’t go well.  3DMark06 bails out on the 2nd CPU test.  I tried dropping the RAM to 985 since I had tried at 1093 (and reading that the Crucial is 800 with speed ratings of 1066, so it makes me wonder what it can do above 1066).   It still crashed at 985 though so I’ll be content with the 400 until I can try the G-Skill to see if that assists even though it’s on the CPU test.