Intel C2Q Q9300:



The Q9300 was released a few months ago and has been updated a few times since. The series started out with the C0 stepping, moved on to C1 and recently, the M1 stepping has seen the daylight. It seems that the newer stepping have a higher overclock potential, however, higher overclocks are not guaranteed as the good C0's are still doing at least equally good compared to the average M1 stepping.



Our chip has been tested and compared to the Phenom X4 recently here and afterwards, we were allowed to push it under a subzero cooling machine.



Thanks to Alternate.be, we managed to lay our hands on an Intel Q9300 processor.

Test setup and methodology

Intel Q9300 Test Setup
CPU	Intel Core2Quad Q9300
Cooling	nVentiv Mach2 Phase-Change (tuned by Jort)
Mainboard	DFI Lanparty UT P35-T2R
Memory	2 * 512MB Transcand PC-6400
Other	Sparkle Calibre 8600GT 512MB Tagan 480W PSU Western Digital 160GB pata HDD Windows XP SP3 Windows Server 2003

The benchmarks we chose to run were those of the HWBot benchmark suite to help our Overclocking Team with more point and higher ranking!

Cpu-z

PiFast

Superpi 1M

Superpi 32M

Wprime 32M

Wprime 1024M

Voltage selection

To give you an idea about the voltage we used, please refer to the bios photograph underneath. Note that these voltages are not safe for 24/7 usage!



Let's have a look at the results ->