Gigabyte GA-EG41MFT-US2H issues

System spec

Q8300
GA-EG41MFT-US2H Motherboard
GTX550TI Gfx card
1 x WD TB hdd
6gb of Hyperam 1333 memory
620 XFX pro psu (seasonic)
Windows 7 64

This is a friends pc, he was getting frequent BSOD's and asked if I could help.

It was an Advent pc from new but the mobo failed about a month back so he to it to a local pc shop for repair.

They installed a new mobo with new DDR3 ram and he upgraded his gfx card but kept his psu which was a ISO 420w piece of crap. I convinced him to get a better psu and I would check his system and put a slight overclock on his pc, was thinking around 3ghz.

When I got the pc I changed the psu and did a few hours of Zombies and could not replicate his BSOD's he was getting.

Temps were fine, was concerned why he had 6gb of ram though, it is a dual channel mobo with 3 x 2gb sticks of unknown single sided ram so wasn't running dual channel, it didn't state it's voltage or timings and can't find anything on the net for it, so I left the voltage at 1.5v.

While games worked fine there were little niggles that made me think some things up, right clicking desktop some times took ages for the properties tab to appear, egg timer would appear for loading most programs, a few not responding programs, IE and Firefox not behaving properly for example, when I click in the search box to start typing the cursor would not be there or appear. Did some scans and found a few trojans, got rid and things seemed a little better.

Then down to overcloking, the Q8300 runs at 2.5ghz at stock, straight to 3ghz I went with 1.4v-core, ram at 1.5v, evreything off auto onto standard voltages but no joy it failed to post, so then I decided to start from scratch.

I tried the same voltages, making sure ram was underclocked, pice freq was at 100 (tried 101 too) and tried booting at 2.6ghz and again no joy. I then tried a lower multi (6) and higer fsb but can't get any where. I later took one stick of ram out to run in dual channel a I feel 4gb is plenty but it made no difference.

Could this mobo be faulty or is just the case of the crap chipset and onbaord gfx making it very difficult.

First thing you do is download CPU-z and put it on your mates machine. That will provide you with all the information you will need.

The second thing you do (assuming you have not done so) is do a fresh install of his operating system. Win7 is a very good OS even for older hardware, do the install with a plugged in network cable to insure the latest drivers are installed. It sounds like the issues you listed are registry based and not hardware based.

As to overclocking, not all CPU's will overclock and worse even not all motherboards will allow even a modest overclock. The CPU-z will show you the motherboard vendor and bios version.

Post back here when you have more information and we can move forward.

Just spoke to the shop who rebuilt the pc,they said the pc was stable as they run furmark for 30 hrs...omg that seems a very long time. After questioning him about the ram he said the correct voltage is 1.175, I said are you sure you're talking about ram and not the cpu, he said yes, doesn't the majority of DDR3 run at 1.5-1.65, some running maybe at 1.3 ?

Getting a bit worried now.

There is no ram that I know of which has a default of 1.175. Since you have CPU-z already you will know what the correct ram voltages are as they are displayed on the SPD. But I am sure you have already.

As to the motherboard I assumed that the board listed was the old one and not the new one. My error. That particular chipset is not known as being much of a over-clocker, and especially with a quad core CPU.

I would strongly recommend a new clean install of OS. There is no point in trying to over-clock with a buggy OS in my view. You are just adding a level of complexity that is not required. Get the whole system working flawlessly at stock before you start over-clocking.