Once stable OC now causing problems.

[mendicitis]

So, I have an opteron 165, overclocked stable for about a year at 2.5ghz. Sweet. Now for the lame... during the past month I've been getting random restarts, bsods, access violation errors, and registry errors. Especially while performing processor intense things (ie, itunes cover flow... encoding audio, etc).

Ran memtest, passed. Tried prime 95, killed one of my cores almost instantly. All right, I though and backed off the OC. All the way back to stock. Well, now I'm finding that the processor is not happy with stock voltage. It requires 1.4v to even start windows successfully. If I back it down to stock vcore, I have almost no stability.

Is this normal? A sign of a dying processor? Any recommendation from the community? What can I do to fix this?

 

[jcll2002]

same type of thing happened to me with my opty 165, but not exactly. I was stable @ 2.9ghz with 1.475v bios but after i changed out a fan (watercooled anyway...) i couldnt get it stable for shit.

Now im back to 2.7ghz stock vcore which i could do from the beginning.

 

[mendicitis]

Do you think that a reinstall of windows would help? I'm thinking no, at least until I can get things to be stable. Any recommendations for settings to achieve this? Is my processor just voltage thirsty? Should I up it more past 1.4 to see if I can pull stability?