Originally posted by: djcool976
I appreciate the tip guys. I'll just stick with DDR2-800. It's the cheapest of the mix anyways. This will OC just fine I assume?
Intel CPUs report their FSB as a "quad-pumped" number, because the CPU makes four transfers per clock cycle of the FSB. What this means is that the true FSB clock speed of an Intel processor is 1/4th of what they tell you.
For your Q6600, that's 1066MHz / 4 = 266 MHz.
DDR2 RAM makes two transfers per clock cycle, so the number reported on your DDR2 needs to be divided by two to find the actual FSB clock speed. DDR2-800 is capable of running up to 800MHz/2 = 400MHz.
If you ran your Q6600 on a FSB of 400MHz, it would be running at 3.6GHz, because 400MHz x 9 (the Q6600's multiplier) = 3600MHz.
I hope all of that made sense.
The short version is that 3.6GHz is as high as you can possibly hope to go with a Q6600, and DDR2-800 can take you there, assuming the rest of your system is up to the task.