Wheres my overclock gone?

Nixh

Nixh

Nixh

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22 Oct 2010
Posts
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A few weeks ago I purchased the Argon Intel Core i3 550 3.20GHz @ 4.00GHz bundle from OCUK and have been extremely pleased with it so far until a few days ago. I opened up CPUID to check some minor details and noticed that my processor was running at 3067.9MHz instead of it's overclocked 4.00GHz stated in the bundle. It was previously running at 4.2GHz when I first booted my PC up after installing the new bundle so it wasn't sent to me un-overclocked (I don't think that's a word 0.o). I've only had a few blue screens since installing the new bundle which windows determined to be caused by a driver or device (The only BSOD I've had have been when booting up a game such as WoW or Crysis).

What has caused my processor to knock off it's overclock as well as the 0.20GHz off the standard clock speed of the 3.20GHz i3 and what can I do to stop/reduce BSOD when booting games and regain the processor speed?

Thanks
 
Try checking CPUZ while rendering a video or something CPU intensive. It's probably just that the CPU isn't working at full speed at the time you are looking at it.
 
Nixh said:
I've only had a few blue screens since installing the new bundle which windows determined to be caused by a driver or device (The only BSOD I've had have been when booting up a game such as WoW or Crysis).

What has caused my processor to knock off it's overclock as well as the 0.20GHz off the standard clock speed of the 3.20GHz i3 and what can I do to stop/reduce BSOD when booting games and regain the processor speed?

Thanks
Click to expand...

Any number of blue screens greater than zero is not good and indicates system instability. Some motherboards will reset to defaults if an overclock fails badly, this could have happened during one of your BSOD

I would get into the BIOS and look to see if it has reset to default, and then I would look at finding the cause of teh BSOD and resolving it - and with not much info given. And you say it happens when you start games I'm gonna point the finger at PSU (as load will increase when the GFX card draws more power) and second guess would be RAM (timings/faulty) as you probably dont stress the RAM that much until you load something like a game. That would be my first and second places to start looking

Impster
 
I've monitored CPUID whilst watching a HD movie and opening a game and the clock speed does not increase or decrease from the stated speed so I don't think it's just hiding unfortunately.

The current spec of my PC is as follows,

Argon Intel Core i3 550 3.20GHz (Overclocked by OCUK to 4.2 now running at 3)
Gigabyte GA-H55M-UD2H MOBO
Eneremax Pro 82+ 420W PSU
Kingston HyperX Blu 4GB (2x2GB)
Radeon HD 5670
Samsung HD321KJ 320G HDD
Artic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro Rev2 CPU cooler

The MOBO, RAM, CPU fan and Processor were all part of an OCUK bundle.

I have the BSOD dump files all saved in their default location and format, when windows prompted me of the BSOD on reboot it said the cause was a driver or device without mentioning which one so I'm unsure with that.
I don't know much of RAM timing and such but have not changed any settings to any part of the system myself since installation.

Thanks
 
Pop into the BIOS and there hopefully should be a option along the bottom which mention loads CMOS from BIOS, Open this and there should be some saved profiles to load.
 
RJC said:
Pop into the BIOS and there hopefully should be a option along the bottom which mention loads CMOS from BIOS, Open this and there should be some saved profiles to load.
Click to expand...

Would this just reset it to it's state before a BSOD? If I do this surely I will still have the issues with BSOD's?

Thanks
 
Nixh said:
Would this just reset it to it's state before a BSOD? If I do this surely I will still have the issues with BSOD's?

Thanks
Click to expand...

Re-instate the Overclock and run Prime 95 for a few hours to check for stability, if you get a restart or a worker thread fail then the overclock is not stable and may require a slight vcore increase.

If the latter is the case the I would put a note in the customer forum.
 
RJC said:
Re-instate the Overclock and run Prime 95 for a few hours to check for stability, if you get a restart or a worker thread fail then the overclock is not stable and may require a slight vcore increase.
Click to expand...

I've put the OCUK overclock profile back on and it's back up at 4.2 I'm going to run Prime a bit later on and see what happens. In the mean time is there any software or a way to view the PC health stats that are shown in my BIOS without actually resetting and viewing them from the BIOS, I ask because the Easy Tuner 6 piece of software that came with the MOBO is clearly lying when it says my CPU is 21C.

Thanks
 
Thanks I'll grab it as soon as I get back and see what temp I'm running at. I haven't tried to open any of the programmes that caused a device or driver related BSOD since re-instating the overclock as I still don't know the cause. If it's a PSU issue would it be because the PSU isn't high enough wattage?

Thanks
 
Cool well that's 1 issue to tick off the list. I still can't work out what is causing a BSOD when booting up programmes such as WoW. It happens once as I run the programme just after the screen goes black to jump into full screen and the actual programme. Once I restart after the BSOD I'm usually able to open the programme without an issue (90% of the time).

Thanks
 
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