Ok, so I'm a first time poster here so please be gentle!
I've posted this in the OC forum as these queries relate to my first attempt at OCing but if the mods feel it would do better elsewhere, please move it!
Right, so after reading various forums and reviews I purchased the components for my first home build.* I'd done a bit of reading about Ocing and figured I'd get suitable components that would hopefully allow me to have a bit of a play around at a later date.* In the end I went for:
MSI P43
E7300
2 x 2GB Corsair xms2 DDR2 6400
Arctic Freezer 7 pro
WD 500GB hardrive
4830 Graphics card
Arctic Cooling PSU (650w I think)
Mhel case (one rear fan and one side)
Vista ultimate
The build went well considering it was my first and was happy with the results but after a couple of months, I thought I'd have a crack at getting it to run a bit faster.
I'll also point out that right before I started to try OCing, I installed the 160GB hard drive from my old PC (complete with XP) into the new case to copy some of the data over.* I'm not sure this is relevant to the problems I'm having but figured I might as well tell you good people everything in
case there's something I haven't considered!
So my pal came round who OCed his rig a while ago to help me out (I'd read the stickies here which were very helpful too) and we disabled the EITS (is that what it's called? The speedstep thing) and increased the speed up to 275 and 280, running prime 95 and all was going well (reducing the memory speed to below 800 each time).* My pal who has a short attention span googled to see what others were getting with the same chip and went straight to 3.4.* Running Prime at that speed caused the second core to crash almost immediately.* Lesson learnt!
I think the next bit is in the right order (there have been a lot of restarts!).* After it crashed I think he had to load the optimised settings in the BIOS and start from scratch and we went back to 2.9 and went up in intervals of 0.05 up to 3.3, testing prime for 30 mins (CPU temp from core temp is maxing out at about 44).* At 3.3 the other core crashed almost immediately.* After this happened, at startup, it said "overclocking attempt failed, do you want to restart with optimised settings or the last settings" (words in red to that effect anyway, I'm sure you folks have seen that screen before!) and I went with "last settings" and reduced it to 3.25 and ran prime for longer and the first core crashed again after about 75 minutes.* I tried to start again from the "last settings" when the screen came up but then it froze with the power and HDD lights on.* After a hard reset it wouldn't boot at all so I powered down, moved the jumpers to clear the CMOS, left them for a few seconds, moved them back and rebooted and it booted back into windows (slowly) and the speeds appear to have been reset (although the EITS was still disabled)
I've now got a few problems which have started at different times in this process (not exactly sure when I'm afraid)
1 The date and time in the BIOS resets itself almost every power down (not every time though)
2 When I save and exit from the BIOS it freezes again (with no video input but power & HDD lights are on) and I have to power down from the button (once it went straight into the windows sequence and another time it went off as soon as I touched the button rather than it having to be held for the 4 seconds or whatever).* Sometimes it needs two goes to get it back up and running and one time it froze in the BIOS screen and needed a hard reset.
3 I'm unable to restart from windows, it logs off then freezes with no input to the monitor but power and HDD lights are on and needs a hard reset.* I've taken to shutting down and then powering up which is a bit annoying. I have changed the relevant settings in Vista.
4 After a couple of the hard resets I've left it to see if it will boot windows up and it's booted up XP from the other drive as it's changed the boot order (the new drive is SATA and the old one is IDE, would the BIOS prioritise the IDE drive?)
I guess the first question is, does it sound like I've overcooked one/some of the components or can these things be fixed in the BIOS/somewhere else?
Any other suggestions for the issues above?
I can adjust the CPU multiplier (down) but I didn't establish the max FSB for the chipset, I just went straight to increasing the speed on the CPU (and changing the RAM multiplier accordingly).* Will this have had an impact on the results?*
I was originally just hoping to increase the speed a bit to feel like I got some extra performance for nothing but I find the whole thing quite interesting (and frustrating!)!
Many thanks if you've got to the end of this essay!* Would really appreciate any help on offer from those with more experience than me!
Cheers
I've posted this in the OC forum as these queries relate to my first attempt at OCing but if the mods feel it would do better elsewhere, please move it!
Right, so after reading various forums and reviews I purchased the components for my first home build.* I'd done a bit of reading about Ocing and figured I'd get suitable components that would hopefully allow me to have a bit of a play around at a later date.* In the end I went for:
MSI P43
E7300
2 x 2GB Corsair xms2 DDR2 6400
Arctic Freezer 7 pro
WD 500GB hardrive
4830 Graphics card
Arctic Cooling PSU (650w I think)
Mhel case (one rear fan and one side)
Vista ultimate
The build went well considering it was my first and was happy with the results but after a couple of months, I thought I'd have a crack at getting it to run a bit faster.
I'll also point out that right before I started to try OCing, I installed the 160GB hard drive from my old PC (complete with XP) into the new case to copy some of the data over.* I'm not sure this is relevant to the problems I'm having but figured I might as well tell you good people everything in
case there's something I haven't considered!
So my pal came round who OCed his rig a while ago to help me out (I'd read the stickies here which were very helpful too) and we disabled the EITS (is that what it's called? The speedstep thing) and increased the speed up to 275 and 280, running prime 95 and all was going well (reducing the memory speed to below 800 each time).* My pal who has a short attention span googled to see what others were getting with the same chip and went straight to 3.4.* Running Prime at that speed caused the second core to crash almost immediately.* Lesson learnt!
I think the next bit is in the right order (there have been a lot of restarts!).* After it crashed I think he had to load the optimised settings in the BIOS and start from scratch and we went back to 2.9 and went up in intervals of 0.05 up to 3.3, testing prime for 30 mins (CPU temp from core temp is maxing out at about 44).* At 3.3 the other core crashed almost immediately.* After this happened, at startup, it said "overclocking attempt failed, do you want to restart with optimised settings or the last settings" (words in red to that effect anyway, I'm sure you folks have seen that screen before!) and I went with "last settings" and reduced it to 3.25 and ran prime for longer and the first core crashed again after about 75 minutes.* I tried to start again from the "last settings" when the screen came up but then it froze with the power and HDD lights on.* After a hard reset it wouldn't boot at all so I powered down, moved the jumpers to clear the CMOS, left them for a few seconds, moved them back and rebooted and it booted back into windows (slowly) and the speeds appear to have been reset (although the EITS was still disabled)
I've now got a few problems which have started at different times in this process (not exactly sure when I'm afraid)
1 The date and time in the BIOS resets itself almost every power down (not every time though)
2 When I save and exit from the BIOS it freezes again (with no video input but power & HDD lights are on) and I have to power down from the button (once it went straight into the windows sequence and another time it went off as soon as I touched the button rather than it having to be held for the 4 seconds or whatever).* Sometimes it needs two goes to get it back up and running and one time it froze in the BIOS screen and needed a hard reset.
3 I'm unable to restart from windows, it logs off then freezes with no input to the monitor but power and HDD lights are on and needs a hard reset.* I've taken to shutting down and then powering up which is a bit annoying. I have changed the relevant settings in Vista.
4 After a couple of the hard resets I've left it to see if it will boot windows up and it's booted up XP from the other drive as it's changed the boot order (the new drive is SATA and the old one is IDE, would the BIOS prioritise the IDE drive?)
I guess the first question is, does it sound like I've overcooked one/some of the components or can these things be fixed in the BIOS/somewhere else?
Any other suggestions for the issues above?
I can adjust the CPU multiplier (down) but I didn't establish the max FSB for the chipset, I just went straight to increasing the speed on the CPU (and changing the RAM multiplier accordingly).* Will this have had an impact on the results?*
I was originally just hoping to increase the speed a bit to feel like I got some extra performance for nothing but I find the whole thing quite interesting (and frustrating!)!
Many thanks if you've got to the end of this essay!* Would really appreciate any help on offer from those with more experience than me!
Cheers
