A little help?

Associate
Joined
21 Apr 2010
Posts
812
Heya,

I would like to ask a little help from the experts. Sorry if this is a little long...

Last year I bought from OCUK a *OVERCLOCKED* Intel Core i7 930 2.80GHz @ 4.00GHz Asus P6T Intel X58 DDR3 Motherboard Corsair XMS3 6GB (3x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 Tri-Channel DDR3 Bundle. I upgraded my case, stuck in a SLI GTX 9800. I also have a corsair 750W PSU from my last PC I transferred. All has been well. I bought the bundle because I dont know anything about overclocking so thought, sod it, these boys seem to know what they are on about.

With the coming of BF3 I decided to try and take it as far as i could so I sold the old GPU's and bought 2x Asus GeForce GTX 560Ti DirectCU II TOP 1024MB cards.

The bloomin SLI bridge did not fit - it was one of those hard backed 6 slot thingies and the new cards needed a dual slot strip whatsit. After enquiring on OCUK, who do not supply them, I got one of ebay and it took 10 days to arrive. Gah.

In the meantime I have been running a single GTX560Ti and all was well.

I got a bit carried away whilst drunk last week and bought a new 27" monitor and some Corsair XMS3 6GB (3x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Triple Channel (CMX6GX3M3A1600C9), which matches the RAM in the current system. (I haven't told the missus about this yet BTW eeek)

Now I know adding more ram to a pre overclocked bundle invalidated the warrently and cant be assured as stable blah blah, but its over a year old anyway so what the hell.

Lucky for me the bridge and the ram arrived on the same day so I reset the bios to default, installed the SLI GTX 560's and the RAM and rebooted. It seemed to go well so I loaded the OCUK overclock.

After that GPU precision was showing a 98 degree temp in the top card and BF3 was crashing randomly after about 5 minutes - total hang requiring a hard reboot - yikes. The screens would just freeze up and no input whatsoever from the mouse or keyboard even CTRL+ALT+DEL. I thought the cards may be going into temperature protection mode-thingy.

I need to keep the cards very close with no room between them as I only have 2 PCIe slots, so I serached this forum and others and I saw some other peeps were having similar overheating GPU problems so I bought a couple of the spot coolers and stuck a bit of plastic in between the cards to open them up a bit and now the temps are well below 70 degrees on load. Sorted.

However the Hangs to hard reboot were still happening, in particular when the VRAM was reading more than 1000MB on both cards.

So I removed the new new RAM and all seemed stable. This lead me to believe that the stock overclock may be causing the new RAM to crash out when the VRAM is exceeded and the game buffers to RAM. Is this reasonable thinking or am I stupid?

I don't mind declocking the RAM to use the 6gig of new stuff but I have no idea how to do it. Can I declock the RAM without affecting the CPU overclock? If so, how? What should I be looking for in the BIOS and what should I change?

Heres some Pic's. Im no expert so the wiring could be better... cough...

3screen.jpg


case.jpg


airflow.jpg


all.jpg


cpu.jpg


in1.jpg


sli.jpg


If you need any more info to halp me out then fire away. I'm Ok at building systems but I'm a total Overclock Noob.

Oh I'm getting about 90FPS on BF3 on a mix of med and ultra settings which is sweet - only on a single monitor though, on the surround resolution I get about 20-35fps which is ***** ;)
 
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Oh finally, could the 750 watter PSU not be up to the job? I had another total lock up after removing the RAM tonight, but rather than 5 mins into a match I played for about 4 hours before it went pop. I had just killed about 15 peeps with a Mortar aswell which was a bit of a blow...
 
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I would save your overclocked profile that OCUk did for you on a spare profile slot in the BIOS and load up the defaults for the motherboard and test the ram again to make sure it is stable in a system that is not overclocked. If it is stable and working fine then I would reload the OCUK overclock and look at the voltages that are set and see if I have a bit of room to raise them maybe a notch at a time and test again to see if all is stable. If you can't get it stable then reduce the overclock a touch.

Also if you could stick you CPU overclock settings you have on here, people will be able to tell you if you have room to play with voltages and check what the RAM is set at too, normally you should not need to overclock the memory, setting it at its working speed and voltage is all you will need to do.


Also the 750 watt corsair should be fine. Also run prime and Intel burn test to check for stability.
 
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Also if you could stick you CPU overclock settings you have on here, people will be able to tell you if you have room to play with voltages and check what the RAM is set at too, normally you should not need to overclock the memory, setting it at its working speed and voltage is all you will need to do.

Also the 750 watt corsair should be fine. Also run prime and Intel burn test to check for stability.

Thanks mate for your reply and I know its late so nice work. I've been faffing with this for days. I will try running without the OC with the new RAM tomorrow for sure and report back.

Anyway you have asked for the CPU overclock settings. I have no idea what you are after exactly as I am a complete smacktard when it comes to BIOS settings other than changing the boot order or disabling the bleeding onboard soundcard so I have gone into my BIOS and written down everything that is not on auto or normal.

AI Overclock Tuner: Manual
CPU ratio setting: 21.0
Intel Speedstep: Enabled
BCLK Freq: 191
PCIE Freq: 101
DRAM Freq: DDR3 1531mHz
CPU Voltage: 1.32500
DRAM Bus Voltage 1.64
Load Line: Enabled
CPU spread spectrum: Disabled
PCIE spread spectrum: Disabled
 
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