BSOD help needed

[EasyPC]

Hi, hoping someone can give me a bit of advice.

Just over 12 months ago I built the following machine:-

Mobo - Asus maximus Formula x38 (Bios v.1201)

CPU - E8400 + Arctic Freezer 7 Pro

RAM - 4gb Geil Black Dragon GB24GB6400C5DC

GPU - Gigabyte 8800GT Factory overclocked

PSU - Antec NeoPower 650 Blue modular

OS - Windows Vista Home Premium 64 bit


Shortly after building I decided to to try and overclock a bit (my first atempt at doing this). I slowly increased up to where I am today, 3.6GHz (400 x 9). All other BIOS settings, frequencies, volts etc I left set to Auto. Prime95 tests ran fine with CPU-Z reporting temps of about 52/50 @ 100% load. However a few weeks ago I started having problems with long boot times (up to 10 minutes or more) and random BSODs. Reinstalling the OS has cured the long boot times (missing system drivers I think) but I am still getting frequent BSODs when using CPU/RAM intensive apps (runs fine in Windows). Prime95 will not now run at all past a few seconds before the system crashes. I have tried both sticks of RAM independantly in different slots but the result is the same. I have noticed that CPU-Z is reporting that memory is running at 480MHz with a FSB/DRAM ratio of 5:6, I'm pretty sure that this used to read 400MHz at 1:1 but I haven't changed anything. The only thing I can think of with my very limited knowledge is to increase voltages manually to CPU and/or RAM, does this make sense or am I barking up te wrong tree?

Any help or suggestions most welcome,

Pete.

 

[Sasso]

get memtest on the go your ram may have died, does prime crash when running small fft? or blend? as if its the small one then its more likely to be somehting with the cpu. are you setting the vcore manually or are you leaving thaton auto as i strongly advise to input this yaself as i noticed a bit difference between my stable volts and the volts asus would choose for me, they like to give it a lot more than it needed. as for the ram you should set the volts to what it says and for the frequency pick the one that is closest to the stock from the "drop down" menu. see where all that gets ya and report back

edit..... ooo almost forgot somehting, when i overclocked i neede to increase the northbridge voltage slightly to help the overall stability as memtest was fine, small ftt was fine but when i did blend it would fail, the NB voltage up saved this and also keep an eye on vdroop, might wana try the pencil mod if its too bad, pretty simple to do and helped me not need to enter such a high vcore in the bios

 

[EasyPC]

Thanks for quick reply.

Prime crashes on both small fft and blend.

vcore is set to auto with CPU-z reporting 1.240v you think this might be too high?

You might be right about the problem being with the CPU because I noticed on one occasion when running Prime with one stick of RAM CPU-Z reorted 0% load on one of the cores.

Thanks.

 

[Sasso]

if its failing instantly i would imagine its lack of vcore, i think when i clocked mine to 4GHz ( ) the vcore was like 1.326...but mine might be an earlier revision so they might have improved since mine.