Z87X-OC BSOD

V33Fury · 7 May 2015 at 09:06

Hi all,

Was messing around with my clock settings last night after running some benchmarks - I just tried the overclock profile option available in BIOS (20% updagrade) which bumps me up to 4.3Ghz (not sure what memory speed) but after running the benchmark again, it doesn't actually bump the speed up either on idle or under load - 3Dmark reported max turbo clock as 3.4 which is standard. So I tried going manually and upping the CPU base clock, leaving multiplier and voltage standard, and then upped the memory from 1600 to 2000, it automatically upped the voltage to 1.65v from 1.5v I think. It wouldn't boot properly after that - would just hang, so I made sure to put the memory back to normal as I didn't want to alter voltages in the first place. Still no boot. Reset BIOS to default and now when it starts it will always ask if I want to go into startup repair or launch normally. If i launch normally, the Win7 logo animation will start for half a second and then all USB devices go off, and then BSOD saying it's been shut down to prevent damage with STOP code 0x000007B - apparently that means innaccesible boot device!? Startup repair just fails and says it couldn't finish. Any ideas? I've tried swapping SATA port on main HDD and only having that plugged in but exactly the same...

Borealis · 7 May 2015 at 09:52

What base clock are you using?

On the current intel systems, you should leave the base clock alone and up the multiplier/voltage as necessary.

Have you tried a CMOS reset. That will reset the BIOS to defaults.

stulid · 7 May 2015 at 12:03

Use CPU-Z to verify the actual Core speed, dont rely on 3Dmark as I don't even think it changes it's reported core speed, it just tells you what a stock CPU is.

V33Fury · 7 May 2015 at 12:23

I told it to load defaults in BIOS which put the cpu base back to 34 I think it is. Haven't tried CMOS yet so can give that a go. I wonder whether it has actually corrupted the Win install somehow when it crashed before.

I checked CPUZ and it reported 3.4 - I assume that with these chips it has a turbo clock profile as well, so that under load it should bump it up. Seems strange that the overclock profile doesn't seem to have any effect.

stulid · 7 May 2015 at 17:01

You need to put it under some sort of load and watch the core speed in CPU-Z, use SuperPi and do a run (pick a medium length calculation).

V33Fury · 12 May 2015 at 01:20

Just an update on this - all is running fine now.

I tried clearing CMOS to no effect and then double checked all BIOS settings. It had changed SATA mode to AHCI - switched it back to IDE and everything worked. I guess the OC was unstable, resetting BIOS changed the SATA mode and problems occurred.

Thanks for suggestions - will look into messing around with the clock speeds again and see how it goes!

stulid · 12 May 2015 at 10:44

AHCI is the default setting.

Did you do a fresh install with this board or did you just carry over your drive and made it work by setting the controller to IDE?

V33Fury · 12 May 2015 at 13:22

I did a clean install - I used to have trouble with my old SSD which was not fully SATA compliant. I formatted it to GPT, but 50% of boots would fail due to no boot device, rebooting would normally fix it. As far as I remember I would've set it to IDE as I haven't used RAID or anything like that.