Killing infrequent BSOD on bootup with cores unlocked and overclocked CPU.

[Uriel]

My unlocked, overclocked Athlon X2 5000+ @ Phenom FX-5000 is, for the most part, stable. It'll game, loop Prime95 and 3DMark at the same time for hours, pass 20x intelburn, pass long S&M at 100% load. There's no instabily at all unless I try to push my overclock higher.

However - I get occasional BSODs (0x00000078 PHASE0 Exception) on startup, at the point where the Windows 7 logo animates for the first time. This isn't particularly inconveneint - it's maybe 1 in 15 to 20 restarts. I've always been able to restart and boot fine.

I've spotted a possible workaround: messing with the boot options:
http://www.microsoft.com/taiwan/technet/sysinternals/information/bootini.mspx

/BREAK

• Causes the hardware abstraction layer (HAL) to stop at a breakpoint at HAL initialization. The first thing the Windows kernel does when it initializes is to initialize the HAL, so this breakpoint is the earliest one possible. The HAL will wait indefinitely at the breakpoint until a kernel-debugger connection is made. If the switch is used without the /DEBUG switch, the system will Blue Screen with a STOP code of 0x00000078 (PHASE0_ EXCEPTION).

Now it's very tempting to disable that break point. I looks like working around the problem rather than properly solving it would be so easy.

I know there is a problem with one of my cores but some tweaking has got it to behave (at least to the point where it only generates warnings in event viewer not errors) - apart from this one not particularly inconvenient issue.

So - disable the break point or keep messing with settings to see if I can really solve the problem (been at it for a couple of weeks now)? What do you reckon?

Edit: of course - I could solve it by just running the PC 24/7. No restarts - no issue...

 

[JonJ678]

Running it 24/7 is always a good option

Otherwise, is it possible this is unrelated to the overclock, and just windows 7 misbehaving? Depending on how complex your back up system is I'd be inclined to reinstall windows to see if that solves the issue.

Overclocking seems to feature a large number of crashes, and occasionally leaves me with a copy of windows which is unstable even if I go back to stock settings.