hey all,
couple of questions about my E6300 (conroe).
i've heard that the E6300s have half of their L2 cache disabled, is it possible to reenable it?
i've also heard that the E6300s are REALLY easy to OC, can anyone suggest some stable settings in the 2.2 ghz ballpark? note i have a 3rd party cooler but its only stock rated.
lastly, i was checking crysis requirements and noticed that they think i need at least a E6700 or so to run it properly, is crysis really such a gigantic processor hog? can i manage alright by getting an 8800 gt and relying on my 3 gig of ram?

hello alisbin, all i have the modle right above your processor the E6400 only difrence between them both is that mine is 2.1Ghz ive overclocked mine all the way to 3.69Ghz and although my graphics card is bad i still get decent frames on crysis so a E6300 and 3gb of ram and a 8800gt would hit the spot u could prob run medium settings . since i dont have your processor i cant giv u exact settings if your new to the overclocking game i would suggest lowering your multiplier from X8 to X7 and then increase the bus speed by 5 or 10 each time. your proccesor normaly whould be able to hit 3.00Ghz but 2.2 is decent i guess. and last but not least ive never heard of unlocking the L2 cache but if u figure out how to please do share with us here at techspot =D

Crysis doesn't really use a whole lot of CPU power. My 6300 @ 3220 uses about 60% of each core.

I suppose your 667Mhz RAM should be able to be used at 800Mhz so I would try 7x400 to hit 2800 directly.

You might need to adjust some voltages but be careful not to raise them all too much. Timings might become a problem as well.

Google for beginners guides on c2d overclocking. I found one at tomshardware forum to be useful.

Not sure about how good your ECS board is for overclocking. I used to build with ECS boards all the time, but started getting lousy problems with them so never touched em again.
Probably no good to you now, but Gigabite boards (DS3) perform excellently for Oc'ing the E6xxx series chips.
As mentioned keep upping your fsb, i'd take the ram divider to to manual (maybe x2.5 ish) don't bother with timings yet. Let the fsb and core voltage give you a stable overclock before altering your ram again.

my mobo actually has an overclocking setup in the bios, it does a decent job, but when i OC the ram it tends to crash alot. havnt really tried much ocing with my processor, since basically nothing i've run uses more then maybe 75% of each core (including supreme commander and oblivion with some pretty sick settings) granted i've only got a 7600gt right now and the bottleneck will change when i get an 8800gt. thing is, seems to me that with 25% of processor time free a new card isnt going to create a significant change in bottleneck.