Overclock, BIOS, General Instability

**ROFL Copter** · January 30, 2011, 11:10 PM

I didn't want to have to look for help on this, but I suppose it wouldn't hurt. I put my system together right around Christmas and its been a dream. Mostly. Lately I'm getting some pretty random but frequent blue screens. Most of the time I'm not even round to witness them, I just come back to see that my computer has restarted. One I did see was complaining about how a core failed to report to Windows. Which is bad. The obvious culprit here is an unstable overclock but I cant understand why it is unstable. I have ample power, a very high end board and I've heard good stories about 1090Ts being overclocked. Heres my system in full.

Asus Crosshair IV Formula board
AMD Phenom II 1090T
Corsair Gaming Series 700w PSU
Saphire ATI Radeon 6870
8GB Mushkin RAM (forget the exact details, 1333 Mhz I would think)
Cooler Master 212 Plus cooler
CM 690 II case with 6 fans I believe
1GB Caviar Blue HDD

My overclock is 224x18 for 4Ghz, 1.44v. 12 hours Prime95 tested. 55 degrees on the core and something like 63 when factoring in the fact that Thuban reports incorrectly. I will admit this is my first time overclocking and I may have made mistakes. Seems most people aren't even touching the Bus at all. Should I be doing the same? As well my BIOS is 1102, should I update it and see if it helps? I considered it but am a little worried about the consequences and unsure if it would even make a difference. Thanks for any help.

**mrcrusty** · January 30, 2011, 11:27 PM

1. Have you disabled Cool n Quiet? C1E? Turbo Core?

2. Change your overclock to 200x20. On Black Edition CPUs, upping the HTT is kind of un-necessary. It's useful for getting every single Mhz in an overclock, but if you have an overclock goal, try to reach it with only multipliers first.

3. Try 50 runs of Intel Burn Test @ Maximum, then run Prime95 torture test blend, see if it's actually stable.

4. Try upping the voltage. CPU-NB voltage and RAM voltage. Leave core voltage alone. I doubt that's the issue. 63c is technically over the temperature limit for most Phenom IIs, it's only rated to handle up to 62c. Up the CPU-NB voltage, it handles up to 1.45v, but I recommend never going over 1.35v. RAM voltage is dependent on the RAM, but 1.65v is typical for Mushkins, so try 1.7v.

Particularly with 8GB of RAM, it could be a memory controller and RAM issue. Phenom IIs don't handle lot of RAM very well.

Finally, could you throw up a CPU-Z verification page?

Here's an old one I did: http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=1338745

It'll look like that, but it details most of the important information.

**ROFL Copter** · January 31, 2011, 05:24 PM

I've uploaded a couple of these, but heres another. I'm not going to make any changes until I am reasonably sure what the issue is. Still considering the BIOS update.

**mrcrusty** · January 31, 2011, 06:30 PM

A Bios update probably wouldn't hurt, but do you have Cool n Quiet, and C1E enabled? They have a habit of messing with high overclocks.

**Doono** · February 01, 2011, 12:54 PM

When you started overclocking this did you adjust any of the ram settings? Increasing fsb will increase the speed the RAM runs at if they are linked, if you didn't apply a divider or increased the ram voltages that could be causing the crashing.

**Devilmaypoop** · February 01, 2011, 01:36 PM

Your temperature is way too high, it will degrade it pretty fast. Preferred is 55c at max load and 62c is something you should never get to. Get a better cooling solution ASAP if you want to keep that OC.

No wonder you're unstable either, because high temps cause instability.

**ROFL Copter** · February 01, 2011, 02:48 PM

What is Cool n Quiet? How do I disable it? I did not touch the RAM at all, that may be an issue. And as I said the Core Temp hits 55 at absolute max on a 12 hour Prime95 load. Temps shouldn't be a big issue.

I plugged a portable HDD into the front case USB port yesterday and my computer flickered and turned off. When I restarted it complained that the overclock had failed and returned me to default settings. What happened?

**Devilmaypoop** · February 01, 2011, 03:11 PM

Originally Posted by ROFL Copter

What is Cool n Quiet? How do I disable it? I did not touch the RAM at all, that may be an issue. And as I said the Core Temp hits 55 at absolute max on a 12 hour Prime95 load. Temps shouldn't be a big issue.

Wich is around 62c - 67c when thinking about the 5c - 15c offset. You should monitor Socket temp instead of core temp. Cool n Quiet underclocks your CPU while you're idling, by lowering your cpu multiplier. You can turn it off in BIOS. Set your ram in bios as close as stock as possible. Preferably not over stock.

I plugged a portable HDD into the front case USB port yesterday and my computer flickered and turned off. When I restarted it complained that the overclock had failed and returned me to default settings. What happened?

Instability happened. You might need more vcore, wich will rise the already high temps.

**mrcrusty** · February 02, 2011, 02:04 AM

The thing I'm thinking though is if it's a temperature problem, then wouldn't it crash during the stress testing and not idle use?

But it wouldn't hurt to dial down the volts and overclock. Try clocking down (via the FSB) your CPU to ~3.85 Ghz and bringing voltage down to 1.4v. Stabilise it with 50 runs of IBT on Max followed by a 10 hour Prime95 run on Blend. Make sure temperatures aren't high and see whether the problem has gone away. Sure, you lose your 4 Ghz overclock, but that's 95% e-penis and 5% practical. If the problem goes away, then try to overclock the Northbridge. Thubans have good NB overclocks and it's much better for your performance. A linear 10% increase in fps for all of your games is not out of the question with a good Northbridge overclock.