e6600/ga-965p-d16 FSB has locked itself

milkkart_ · 30 Sep 2011 at 17:44

TL;DR overclocking worked before but now the FSB is stuck at 266 and changing it in bios does nothing. HELP!

so the other day after playing wh40k: space marine for a while and getting sick of my old knacker PCs performance i decided to OC it a bit. i've done it before a few times and its always worked fine but recently its been at stock.

fiddled about with the CPU settings for a while and found i could get stable 3GHz with stock Vcore not to much heat even with my stock cooler. next i started on the ram and eventually had it up to 1000MT/s with 4-4-4-10 timings but it seemed like it was performing better at previous 950 setting so i went into the bios and changed it back. rebooted into windows and CPU-Z shows FSB as 266MHz. since then i haven't been able to get the FSB to change, no matter what i set it to in the bios it comes up as 266 in CPU-Z and the performance in stress test programs indicates it is definitely running at that speed.

i can still change all the other settings, cpu/ram multipliers, CAS timings, voltages (oddly it always reports Vcore to be lower than what i set it to, did that before though). reflashing bios with older ones and back to current (F13) didn't change anything. really need some help on this, its driving me round the bend now.

thanks.

milkkart_ · 30 Sep 2011 at 23:22

ok seem to have it sorted out. put the CMOS clear jumper on and pulled the battery out then left it unplugged for a good 10min and it seems to be back to normal. very weird problem that seems to mostly happen with gigabyte. DS3 boards.

wannabedamned · 1 Oct 2011 at 00:22

yeah, My brothers board is the same.(DS3) Now and again, the settings just wont change. And a hard Cmos reset cures it. Its like the board just refuses to save the new state. Glad you sorted it though, If you carry on playing with the settings I can guarantee it will happen again at some point in the future though

milkkart_ · 1 Oct 2011 at 09:59

forgot to mention, one of the other symptoms is the option to disable EIST disappears. that could be what causes the FSB to lock out given EIST is designed to reduce clock speed and voltage. not sure what would cause EIST to lock on though, maybe just trying to push the board too hard.

got to say if i buy another mobo i don't think it would be gigabyte unless they've really gotten better. the actual OCing capabilities for this board are pretty great but getting it there is a pain in the arse. the bios still isn't that great 13 revisions in either.

you were right about it being a repeat problem too, was trying to find the best setup for the ram and it went off again.