Ran Prime For The First Time With Fatal Error

First off been having lots of problems overclocking the q9400.. Can't find any threads on overclocking this cpu and im a noob.. well i thought i finally got it to a 3.0 and thought it was stable tell i ran prime.. Works 2-4 found Fatal Errors but worker 1 was still going.. Ran it over night for about 9 hours...
Any help would be great..
Also if any one has got good overclocking numbers with this chip please share..
q9400
evga 780i ftw
ocz 4gig dual channel 1066
evga gtx 260 core 216
psu 610
tower 120
thermaltake armor + mx

[retina]

Overclocking is a very "personal" thing. Sometimes you can be lucky and get a "hot chip" (as it is known by the chip makers) and sometimes you get a "cold chip", and anything in between is also a possibility. Basically every chip is individual in it's response to overclocking and voltage settings. What worked for someone else may not work for you. Or you may find that you can get a better result than others with the same settings. It just depends upon the "temperature" of your particular system.

PS: "Hot", "cold" and "temperature" above do not actually mean the physical degrees Celsius.

[Andi47]

Do I understand the terminology correctly - a "hot" chip is one that runs stable even if it is very much overclocked, while a "cold" chip produces errors when you even *think* about overclocking?

BTW: When prime95 gets fatal errors on an overclocked cpu, the overclock is almost certainly*) too high. Do the following steps:

1.) reduce the overclock by one or to notches.
2.) run prime95 and do a torture test.
3.) Repeat steps 1 and 2 until prime95 runs stable.
4.) reduce the overclock by one more notch to be on the save side.

*) If prime95 keeps getting fatal errors even when the CPU is clocked at normal speed or underclocked, another part of the PC (e.g. a RAM) might be faulty.

[retina]

Originally Posted by Andi47

Do I understand the terminology correctly - a "hot" chip is one that runs stable even if it is very much overclocked, while a "cold" chip produces errors when you even *think* about overclocking?

Correct. Hot chips can either run faster with the same voltage setting, or alternatively can run at the same speed with a lower voltage setting. If you are interested you can read about what TI have developed, a control circuit called "SmartReflex" to do automatic voltage adjustments on the fly.

This is why the super-high performance SDRAM sticks can be very expensive. The makers are testing and picking only the hot chips for the boards.