I have the above mobo with a Q6600, 4 x 1Gb of Corsair 6400 DDR2 and a Seasonic 600W PSU. HSF at the moment is an Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro and it's all housed in an Antec P180 case.
I find that I can fairly easily clock my processor/board up to 7 x 400 for 2.8GHz, providing that I lock the PCI-E bus to 101 rather than 100. The CPU does need some extra voltage set in the BIOS for this, but given that it's VID is 1.25v and there is a degree of undervolting by the mobo anyway, this isn't a problem even for my low-end HSF to cope with.
Prime95 running on all 4 cores seems stable for as long as I care to run it. No problems with general usage, games etc either.
But...
About 1 time out of every 2, when I cold boot the PC I get 1 of 2 types of failure during the POST:
1. The 'overclocking failed' message, or
2. Something referring to 'Boot Block' (stupidly, I haven't noted down the full text of that message).
Each time, I just need to remove mains power to the board for 10 seconds or so and power up again, usually successfully, and once up the PC is stable and solid.
I know my motherboard is getting on a bit and perhaps isn't the best choice for a quad (it started life with a dual installed) - but before I have to think about whether I want to pay to change it and take my chances on that resolving my issue, is there anything I should look at to see if I can fix my current setup? It does seem strange that a Prime stable clock should cause boot errors, but then I'm no expert so any help appreciated...thanks.
I find that I can fairly easily clock my processor/board up to 7 x 400 for 2.8GHz, providing that I lock the PCI-E bus to 101 rather than 100. The CPU does need some extra voltage set in the BIOS for this, but given that it's VID is 1.25v and there is a degree of undervolting by the mobo anyway, this isn't a problem even for my low-end HSF to cope with.
Prime95 running on all 4 cores seems stable for as long as I care to run it. No problems with general usage, games etc either.
But...
About 1 time out of every 2, when I cold boot the PC I get 1 of 2 types of failure during the POST:
1. The 'overclocking failed' message, or
2. Something referring to 'Boot Block' (stupidly, I haven't noted down the full text of that message).
Each time, I just need to remove mains power to the board for 10 seconds or so and power up again, usually successfully, and once up the PC is stable and solid.
I know my motherboard is getting on a bit and perhaps isn't the best choice for a quad (it started life with a dual installed) - but before I have to think about whether I want to pay to change it and take my chances on that resolving my issue, is there anything I should look at to see if I can fix my current setup? It does seem strange that a Prime stable clock should cause boot errors, but then I'm no expert so any help appreciated...thanks.
I thought that might be the case.