Quick question really... I have had some minor but dramatic instability since installing my new B3-revision motherboard. Even after reformatting & reinstalling Windows 7 from scratch (peace of mind) I noticed when playing a game that I could play for hours without any indication of overheating or anything, then all of a sudden it would hard-lock with corrupted sound/static coming out of the headphones.
The graphics cards weren't going over about 55C fully loaded with the CPU even lower than that, so confident it is not heat-related. There was also zero indication that it was about to crash, no artifacting or anything... it would literally run the same game for hours, then hard-lock.
Also, it did the same thing in Windows about 2-3 times even when it was just completely idle!
As I'm a total noob to Sandybridge and i7 in general I just left everything on "Auto" in the BIOS, i.e. everything on "optimised defaults".
When trying to diagnose the problem I noticed in CPU-Z that the speed of my CPU was going up and down depending on usage, and that the SPD settings for my memory didn't match what it was specced for. It was showing as running at PC2-1333 and the timings were a mixture of too slack and too tight. In particular the Command Rate was 1T instead of the rated 2N (which I assume is equivalent to 2T).
Anyway, I loaded the BIOS and selected an option called "X.M.P" or something, which seemed to exactly detect the correct speed & timings for my RAM (PC3-2133 9-11-9-28-2N). Doing this also seems to have disabled whatever was making the CPU speed up and down because it's now locked at 3.8Ghz at all times.
Since doing that I haven't had a crash once (touch wood). Interested to hear more experienced peoples views on whether they've had similar experiences and/or whether they think that's what my problem would've been...
The graphics cards weren't going over about 55C fully loaded with the CPU even lower than that, so confident it is not heat-related. There was also zero indication that it was about to crash, no artifacting or anything... it would literally run the same game for hours, then hard-lock.
Also, it did the same thing in Windows about 2-3 times even when it was just completely idle!
As I'm a total noob to Sandybridge and i7 in general I just left everything on "Auto" in the BIOS, i.e. everything on "optimised defaults".
When trying to diagnose the problem I noticed in CPU-Z that the speed of my CPU was going up and down depending on usage, and that the SPD settings for my memory didn't match what it was specced for. It was showing as running at PC2-1333 and the timings were a mixture of too slack and too tight. In particular the Command Rate was 1T instead of the rated 2N (which I assume is equivalent to 2T).
Anyway, I loaded the BIOS and selected an option called "X.M.P" or something, which seemed to exactly detect the correct speed & timings for my RAM (PC3-2133 9-11-9-28-2N). Doing this also seems to have disabled whatever was making the CPU speed up and down because it's now locked at 3.8Ghz at all times.
Since doing that I haven't had a crash once (touch wood). Interested to hear more experienced peoples views on whether they've had similar experiences and/or whether they think that's what my problem would've been...
