Lesser known dangers of Overclocking

simonnance · 16 Mar 2007 at 00:37

Thought i'd have a fun eve pushing my system to the limits, and it was rather educational in a number of ways...... some good, some bad.

Firstly, i can get my E6400 boot stable at 3.6Ghz/1.425V (didnt do any stability testing), at which point it benches about the same on Sandra as a Q6300 (1.86Ghz quad core) for ALU/FPU.

Secondly, it IS possible to corrupt your windows instalation through overclocking (tried to push up to 3.7Ghz). Thankfully i had some unformated space on my new HDD, and all my important docs are in a seperate partition on the new HDD, so i just formated a new partition, installed windows, and can pull any important stuff off the "busted windows" bit (like god knows how many emails in Thunderbird).

Anyone else had anything like that? not just comp reboots and BSODs

t31os · 16 Mar 2007 at 00:49

Instability can cause data corruption yes, thats 1 reason why its a good idea to use a proper stress test.

simonnance · 16 Mar 2007 at 01:00

yeah, but this was on boot up with new settings...... hard to stress test under that situation!

t31os · 16 Mar 2007 at 01:02

You shouldnt really install the OS OC'ed unless you know you have a working OC, if thats what you're saying.

simonnance · 16 Mar 2007 at 01:16

I didnt..... going back to bios defaults was the first thing i did to try and get back into the busted XP.

Rroff · 16 Mar 2007 at 01:42

Usually thats caused by upping the PCI/SATA bus, rather than leaving it locked at default...

simonnance · 16 Mar 2007 at 02:01

Nope, PCI is unlinked to my FSB.

Benching now at 8x438 @ 1.425V - 3.5Ghz, DDR2-875 4-4-4-12-16-2T

clone · 16 Mar 2007 at 07:54

My raid setup got borked when i overclocked once,had to do a fresh install to fix it,my single drive seem`s to hold out better for overclocking.

Corasik · 16 Mar 2007 at 18:44

Windows makes several disk writes during startup, if the system is 'very' unstable yes, it can write data to the wrong locations on the hard drive, potentially overwriting, and corrupting the windows installation.

I have a 'test' CD which loads Memtest 86, and when pushing the limits of an overclock I run this before I boot up my windows. If it cant pass 1 complete cycle of memtest, then its quite likely to corrupt the windows install.

If there are no errors after 5 passes, then even though the system may still fail orthos, at least its not totally unstable, and naturally that reduces the risk of disk corruption.

As already mentioned it 'can' also be due to running the PCI/SATA/PCIe buses out of spec,

Jokester · 16 Mar 2007 at 18:49

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17612922

It's in the first paragraph

.

Jokester