So far I have read that you can overclock a Q6600 to 3.6GHZ on air. In my system I dont want to deal with liquid so I wanna stick with air cooling. So basically I was wondering would I be able to hit that speed with DDR2 800 without overclocking the ram or should I go with 1066? Also, I was wondering if I would get better performance if I bought 1066 and underclocked it to run at tighter timings? I plan on getting 4x1GB sticks. Price is not a large consideration here either.

3.6 on air I think that's a bit optimistic. 3.2 is about average not to say some didn't get 3.6. Hell many folks with E6600 don't hit 3.6. Rather than waste your money on better ram put it into the cpu. In terms of real world performance the best ram only makes 5% difference over value 667. When I was OC'ing my E6600 I backed my ram way down the difference in performance was insignifigant in application testing. Yes it made difference but not enough that you would noticed without benchmarking tools.

Yeah, 3.6 is good for an E6600, but the Q6600s run waaaaay hotter, would be surprised if you got anywhere near that tbh.

As regards putting the money you'd spend on better RAM into the CPU, I don't think it would make much difference, as the next CPU up is an 'extreme', which cost an absolute fortune. Unless you could put that money into a GFX card upgrade if you game, wouldn't be too bad spending it on the PC8500 considering how cheap it is at the moment. As bydesign says though, will only give a small performance increase, so perhaps you should just save the money

well i am running Q6600 @ 3.4 on air cooling with 800 RAM...

I let the timings auto and running it 1:1 which results in stable system..

btw.. dont get 4X1GB ram.. instead go with 2X2GB
2 reasons for that :

1- easier to overclock ram with less modules
2- you still got 2 slots to upgrade your system to 8GB

Specs:

Q6600 @ 3.4 Ghz (cooler scythe ninja plus rev.B)
Board : Gigabyte GA-P35-DQ6
Ram : 2xGB OZC 2GB8004GK
PSU : Enermax Infinity 720W

Damn 3.4 on Air....

I got my q6600 just over 3 and it was running at 69 degrees under load. You must have an ultra flat heatsink/processor or mine suck!

wanting to get a 3.6ghz on a quad without watercooling ?
you will have to try 5-10 cpu to get one that fits what you want... then, be sure you have a rock stable motherboard... 800mhz ram is sufficient with 9x400 = 3600. you won't get to 3.6ghz using another multi with air cooling... even some vapochilled cpu didn't get to 3.5ghz so...

personnally, i would get the lowest featured board with a P35/ICH9R watercool to the chipset, video card and maybe ram with ocz flex units...
and a vapochill for the cpu. might be the black pearl edition...

with a low power draw video card, i should be fine with the PSU supplied with the antec SONATA III while watercooling and vapochill aren't powered by it.

i expect

I'm run @3.6GHz on air and my RAM is Crucial Ballistix Tracer 1066 or PC2 8500. These babys run @800MHz @ 3-3-3-8 @2.2v, or 1200MHz @5-5-5-15 @2.2v.

This is really making my decision hard here. I am thinking I might go with the Ultra 120 Thermo electric cooler. It looks like the best air cooler out there and almost comparable to water cooling.

I am having a tough time keeping my E6600 @3.6GHz cool, and you think you can air cool "four cores" on air at 3.6GHz.

Wassup,
Great Info , whats the exact model number of your memory modules from OCZ ?!
peace

in all the benches I have seen with games.. 90% of it is CPU and GPU very little has to do with ram and FSB ect is this about right? in all the expertise out there ?

Yup, ram speed doesn't account for much performance. In gaming terms it would be gfx, cpu, (as you mentioned, they are the major two) hdd, ram in that order.

There's a load of **** !

I would grab the DDR2-800 and get as close to 3.6GHz as you can. Which so far doesn't seem to be very difficult to do on air http://www.xtremesystems.org/forum [...] p?t=152722

Of course every chip is different and things like lapping your heatsink and/or cpu will help maximize your OC.