Just a thought on your pre-overclocked systems

Reality|Bites · 14 Mar 2015 at 10:10

Over the years I've read of many people buying these systems and all is fine until they either mess about with the bios trying to overclock futher or something goes wrong on it's own and the bios needs reset.
They come on here asking what settings were used as they didn't take note of them when they received the system.
Would it be a good idea to take screenshots of the bios settings while the system is being set up and then either printing them out or e-mailing them to the customer when it's been despatched?

Shinobi026 · 15 Mar 2015 at 03:46

I had a CPU die on me due to the Overclock it came with being too high / incorrect settings. I would say the customer has a duty to at least learn a little as to what settings the system came with and what they mean. I got my rig back from OC after repair running at 4.2Ghz 1.32v 30c and after abit of googling and youtubing have got it to 4.4Ghz 1.18v 23c stable. I don't think the overclocks systems come with these days are as unique to each system/chip as they used to be. You may find you can achieve a better faster cooler and more stable OC yourself!

deano-5 · 15 Mar 2015 at 04:10

Reality|Bites said:
Over the years I've read of many people buying these systems and all is fine until they either mess about with the bios trying to overclock futher or something goes wrong on it's own and the bios needs reset.
They come on here asking what settings were used as they didn't take note of them when they received the system.
Would it be a good idea to take screenshots of the bios settings while the system is being set up and then either printing them out or e-mailing them to the customer when it's been despatched?

Shinobi026 said:
I had a CPU die on me due to the Overclock it came with being too high / incorrect settings. I would say the customer has a duty to at least learn a little as to what settings the system came with and what they mean. I got my rig back from OC after repair running at 4.2Ghz 1.32v 30c and after abit of googling and youtubing have got it to 4.4Ghz 1.18v 23c stable. I don't think the overclocks systems come with these days are as unique to each system/chip as they used to be. You may find you can achieve a better faster cooler and more stable OC yourself!

All good points/ideas

Bryan Kortez · 15 Mar 2015 at 19:13

Depending on motherboard features, you'll actually find you can save multiple BIOS Profiles. If you change settings and can't remember the settings, you could just reload the previous profile.

paulo7 · 15 Mar 2015 at 21:09

Sounds like a good idea to me

ZXSpectrum · 16 Mar 2015 at 16:06

Shinobi026 said:
I had a CPU die on me due to the Overclock it came with being too high / incorrect settings. I would say the customer has a duty to at least learn a little as to what settings the system came with and what they mean. I got my rig back from OC after repair running at 4.2Ghz 1.32v 30c and after abit of googling and youtubing have got it to 4.4Ghz 1.18v 23c stable. I don't think the overclocks systems come with these days are as unique to each system/chip as they used to be. You may find you can achieve a better faster cooler and more stable OC yourself!

The issue really is that these systems are build in a commercial manufacturing process not individually built/overclocked as its not cost effective to do so in large quantities. So basically there is a set of BIOS settings and they are used and maybe tweaked a little if it hasn't passed soak test.

That said if you buy a system and its stable at what you bought it at then it should work fine for the rest of its life and you should never need to change them. You also have to remember that often the reason for the settings to be deleted from the BIOS is that the user has updated the BIOS for some reason. Is that down to the manufacturer not supplying a system that is not stable? Or the customer meddling or impatient and does not want to send it back for repair? Regardless a different BIOS build could mean that the settings used when new will not work with the latest BIOS build so you could be screwed. I would have thought that a USB key with the Original BIOS and the Overclocked BIOS profiles should be supplied.