Overclocking dusty old tech breaks sound (Q6600)

Asa · 5 Dec 2011 at 13:48

Hi,

I've been trying to extend the life of my aging Q6600 and MSI P6N SLI V2 with some light overclocking, and came across a problem I can't fix.

When running with my CPU overclocked to a modest 3.06Ghz I have trouble with sound cutting out, or occassionally blasting me with immense fog horns. The problem is prevailent in Bioware games, some other games seem to work without issue. The system is also otherwise 100% stable and cool.

I spent some significant time and effort trying to work around what I thought was a compatibility issue with Bioware games and my hardware/software. I replaced the Creative SB Extreme sound card with an Asus Xonar D2, and I totally wiped out Windows Vista 64 in favour of Win7 64. The issue followed me all over until I set the CPU back to stock speeds.

I suspect that the overclock is throwing my PCI frequencies out, but I am no expert and the MoBo has no options around PCI frequency for me to experiment with.

Any advice (other than "upgrade"- I will when I can!)?

koooowweeee · 5 Dec 2011 at 14:10

what psu do you have?

only thing i can think of is there is not enough power so its acting strange.

what program did you use to test stability?

Asa · 5 Dec 2011 at 14:35

750w PSU, a single HD 6950 being the only significant drain not listed above.

Prime95 64bit for stability testing.

If I leave the CPU speeds at stock and then up the voltage as I had it when overclocked would that be a valid test to prove/disprove the PSU cause?

Harpss1ngh · 5 Dec 2011 at 14:47

Update the sound card drivers and MB chipset drivers, up MB voltage slightly

Try changing the RAM multiplier and give the VTT/FSB voltage a slight increase.

Asa · 5 Dec 2011 at 15:13

Harpss1ngh said:
Update the sound card drivers and MB chipset drivers, up MB voltage slightly

Try changing the RAM multiplier and give the VTT/FSB voltage a slight increase.

Thanks for the tips. Sound card drivers updated for both cards, I think I had my VTT and FSB voltages excessively high if anything (and NB and SB for that matter). I locked the memory timings at 800 and got scared off of memory timing changes but I can certainly look again. Perhaps if I "link" my memory clocks to CPU clocks and let the MoBo take care of it?

Not sure I have any options to tweak MB voltage.