Overclocking Issues

[devarinti]

I tried overclocking my computer yesterday. This computer is only a couple weeks old and I built it myself. It runs on a 3.0 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo Wolfdale E8400 processor with a Gigabyte motherboard specifically EP43 something. I also have 4 gigs of ram on it and bunch of other crap.

Anyways the problem that I encountered yesterday started when I put the settings at 3.2 Ghz just to start with. I just wanted to make sure everything would be fine. Except everything wasn't fine and it ended up taking me damn near six hours and reinstallation of Windows XP to get back to normalcy.

As soon as it restarted with the 3.2 overclock settings, there was a high pitched whine and whenever i tried any overclock this whine persisted. Not only that, right after the first overclock, Windows went crazy on me. It became so slow, XP would get to the part where it goes to loading your personal settings, then it'd just take an hour and get to a screen where it'd show my background and nothing else. No icons, no taskbar no nothing and just stop there. With help online, I found out that I needed to press Ctrl + Alt + Del and then wait for the taskmanager to open up and then wait another half hour for the icons and taskbar to show up. I tried multiple things including sfc cleaner and such. Nothing worked. Even when I set back the clock settings to fail safe or optimized in bios this whole thing persisted.

My question is why can't I overclock and why did that problem occur with the overclocking? After reinstallation everything seems normal so far. Also, why was there a high pitched whine and how do I get rid of it while overclocking? The whine goes away on regular bios settings at 3.0. The big question what happened overall and should I try overclocking again or is this going to be pretty much the computer's fate if i try again??

Thanks for any responses guys.

 

[Seahawks_Fan]

The high pitched whine might be a capacitor leaking. When you overclock one of the cap's might get hot, and they can begin to "boil out" their insulation fluid. This can make a hissing noise, or the sound like a whining teapot.

In any case, you probably will want to look over your motherboard carefully under a good light source, and check for damage or the source of the noise.

Someone else might have an idea or two.

 

[Exeodus]

What is the exact model of your motherboard? How many sticks of ram are you using?

 

[devarinti]

What is the exact model of your motherboard? How many sticks of ram are you using?

GIGABYTE GA-EP43-UD3L LGA 775 Intel P43 ATX Intel Motherboard
That is the specific motherboard I am using right now. And I've two sticks of RAM totaling 4 GB.

 

[devarinti]

The high pitched whine might be a capacitor leaking. When you overclock one of the cap's might get hot, and they can begin to "boil out" their insulation fluid. This can make a hissing noise, or the sound like a whining teapot.

In any case, you probably will want to look over your motherboard carefully under a good light source, and check for damage or the source of the noise.

Someone else might have an idea or two.

It wasn't really like a teapot boiling kind of noise. It was just a annoying whine which was somewhat high pitched. Its a little hard to describe it I guess. If something was damaged though on the motherboard, don't you think it wouldn't start up again or would have trouble starting up. I reinstalled windows and put the BIOS settings to original optimized defaults and now it seems to be working just fine. I also took a second look at the motherboard and really couldn't find anything that had gone wrong with it. There seems to be no real damage to my eye at least.

 

[BillParrish]

The higher currents involved with overclocking will make some of the electroncis associated with delivering power to the cpu "whine" or "squeal". This is somewhat common. It is unlikely anything was damaged.

Burn a memtest86+ CD and boot into that, its a bootable CD. This allows you to test OC settings without having windows freeze and crash on you and sometimes hose the installation.

I dont know why you cant overclock other than based on my personal definition you are not OCIng, my guess, and I could be wrong, is that your are slapping in some values you found on the internet somewhere and hoping it works, with predictable results.

Set everything back to factory defaults and reboot. Go into the bios and set up the baisic items you need leaving all OCing frequency and memory settings on stock or disabled and disable manual voltage control. Make sure your SATA connections and settings are correct, use the intel ports for your hard drives, native mode.

Reboot, windows should be normal. if not boot from the windows CD and tell it you want to install windows, it should come back and tell you windows is already installed and ask if you want to repair it , tell it yes and let it do its thing.

Reboot and check for proper operation, if ok continue, if not repost.

Set cpu voltage to 1.325 or next higher available voltage.
Set mch voltage to +.1
Set memory voltage to highest the memory manuf recommends.
Set your timings manually per manuf spec.
Leave all other OCing settings alone
disable EIST and C1E and hyperthreading and virtualization.
enable TM2 and set cpu overtemp alarm ot 80C.

Make double certain the memory mulitplier is at 2.0 and check it if a reboot ever fails or you notice the machine has reset the cpu speed. Make sure it stays at 2.0 until you get the cpu sorted out.

Enable cpu frequency changes and after making sure the machine is fine at stock FSB speed, give it 10MHz increase and test, rinse and repeat until boot problems or booting into memtest results in errors during the first couple of tests. Then back off 20 MHz boot into windows check temps with realtemp etc, and run a stress test and let us know how it went.

repost.

98% of your bios settings are explained here and if it is not mentioned dont mess with it now.
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1169366

 

[Exeodus]

This board has solid caps, therefore leaking should not be a issue. However some VRM's are known to be noisy at times of load. My 4870X2 and 4870 can get pretty loud.

 

[Seahawks_Fan]

Sorry about the incorrect info in my post.

 

[devarinti]

The higher currents involved with overclocking will make some of the electroncis associated with delivering power to the cpu "whine" or "squeal". This is somewhat common. It is unlikely anything was damaged.

Burn a memtest86+ CD and boot into that, its a bootable CD. This allows you to test OC settings without having windows freeze and crash on you and sometimes hose the installation.

I dont know why you cant overclock other than based on my personal definition you are not OCIng, my guess, and I could be wrong, is that your are slapping in some values you found on the internet somewhere and hoping it works, with predictable results.

Set everything back to factory defaults and reboot. Go into the bios and set up the baisic items you need leaving all OCing frequency and memory settings on stock or disabled and disable manual voltage control. Make sure your SATA connections and settings are correct, use the intel ports for your hard drives, native mode.

Reboot, windows should be normal. if not boot from the windows CD and tell it you want to install windows, it should come back and tell you windows is already installed and ask if you want to repair it , tell it yes and let it do its thing.

Reboot and check for proper operation, if ok continue, if not repost.

Set cpu voltage to 1.325 or next higher available voltage.
Set mch voltage to +.1
Set memory voltage to highest the memory manuf recommends.
Set your timings manually per manuf spec.
Leave all other OCing settings alone
disable EIST and C1E and hyperthreading and virtualization.
enable TM2 and set cpu overtemp alarm ot 80C.

Make double certain the memory mulitplier is at 2.0 and check it if a reboot ever fails or you notice the machine has reset the cpu speed. Make sure it stays at 2.0 until you get the cpu sorted out.

Enable cpu frequency changes and after making sure the machine is fine at stock FSB speed, give it 10MHz increase and test, rinse and repeat until boot problems or booting into memtest results in errors during the first couple of tests. Then back off 20 MHz boot into windows check temps with realtemp etc, and run a stress test and let us know how it went.

repost.

98% of your bios settings are explained here and if it is not mentioned dont mess with it now.
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1169366

that link u gave me in the end thats the exact link i used to do the overclock. So, it wasn't just random values I entered but I'll try again and let you know how it goes. Is there any way to actually eliminate that whine though as it is an extremely annoying noise to deal with?

 

[Technophobe]

It's obviously very hard to describe a noise in words. Try disconnecting the PC speaker (if any) - it might be a MB temp or fan warning???

 

[devarinti]

that link u gave me in the end thats the exact link i used to do the overclock. So, it wasn't just random values I entered but I'll try again and let you know how it goes. Is there any way to actually eliminate that whine though as it is an extremely annoying noise to deal with?

So I finally got the overclock to work. It works just fine without me altering anything and suddenly there is no noise either. Weird as it sounds I can't explain why. I got it up to 3.6 ghz but it won't run 3.8.. Every time I try to do 3.8 it won't start up and resets back to 3.0 ghz. My vcore is at 1.3500 volts and multiplier at 9x with 400 Mhz. MCH voltage is at 1.300 v. Anything I need to change for 3.8 to work.

 

[BillParrish]

LOL so it WAS my fault all along (Thats my thread)

Frankly I would leave it alone. No wait, thats no fun Thats a really nice sweet spot if you are running PC6400 800MHz ram. Try 405, then 410, 415 (around there your 800MHz ram will crap out - use memtest86+ boot CD so you can see if its the ram or the cpu giving up. If ram memtest will throw errors, if cpu memtest will not run or freeze. ) Even use 2MHz steps to find out exactly where the trouble starts. Keep notes, You dont need a full memtest pass, let it run the first 3 or 4 tests which only take a few min, then if no errors, reboot raise the FSB a bit and reboot into memtest till somehting bad happens.

You never told us the rated speed of your memory, if PC6400 800MHz stuff you are exactly on spec and will only get about another 20MHz or so of FSB before you have to loosen the timings. If 1066MHz stuff that concern goes away depending on what memory mulitplier you are using.

You could try a bit more Vcore but I would not go over 1.4V (and would feel a lot better about 1.375 ish but I am very conservative).

We have no idea what your temps are (RealTemp utility is very nice) under load.

Frankly you have gotten 90% of the OC with minor effort. It gets much more difficult now for the extra %10 percent. You now need to start running some kind of benchmark and play with the advanced settings. Or just try 1.375 and you might make it.

Need more info on (links if possible) to your ram, How/what are your ram timings and ram voltage set to ? what heatsink ? , and temps from RealTemp would help us give more focused suggestions.

 

[ssg10587]

LOL so it WAS my fault all along (Thats my thread)

Frankly I would leave it alone. No wait, thats no fun Thats a really nice sweet spot if you are running PC6400 800MHz ram. Try 405, then 410, 415 (around there your 800MHz ram will crap out - use memtest86+ boot CD so you can see if its the ram or the cpu giving up. If ram memtest will throw errors, if cpu memtest will not run or freeze. ) Even use 2MHz steps to find out exactly where the trouble starts. Keep notes, You dont need a full memtest pass, let it run the first 3 or 4 tests which only take a few min, then if no errors, reboot raise the FSB a bit and reboot into memtest till somehting bad happens.

You never told us the rated speed of your memory, if PC6400 800MHz stuff you are exactly on spec and will only get about another 20MHz or so of FSB before you have to loosen the timings. If 1066MHz stuff that concern goes away depending on what memory mulitplier you are using.

You could try a bit more Vcore but I would not go over 1.4V (and would feel a lot better about 1.375 ish but I am very conservative).

We have no idea what your temps are (RealTemp utility is very nice) under load.

Frankly you have gotten 90% of the OC with minor effort. It gets much more difficult now for the extra %10 percent. You now need to start running some kind of benchmark and play with the advanced settings. Or just try 1.375 and you might make it.

Need more info on (links if possible) to your ram, How/what are your ram timings and ram voltage set to ? what heatsink ? , and temps from RealTemp would help us give more focused suggestions.

I have been helping him out with this so I can give you some of the info. The ram is G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory - Retail, his timings are 5-5-5-15 and his temps under load are at about 50C using coretemp. For his cpu heatsink he has the nirvana 120 from zerotherm. Ram voltage is set to 2.0V. I have the same memory on my machine which is the same as his basically except I have a q6600 at 3.2ghz.

Edit: Also it wasnt your fault whatsoever. The coil whine was there when we used your settings then went away the next time we used the settings from your thread. So I dont think your settings for the BIOS had anything to do with it. Thanks a lot for that thread though, it helped me a ton for my overclock and it has helped me to help him on his overclock.

 

[BillParrish]

He he , I ment my crack about just slapping in some values. I was a bit cranky that day, it comes with watching 20 years of savings get cut in half because of greedy bankers who then get bailed out with my tax money. /bitter, who me ?

Yep yep k, all looks good. Its going to be tricky to get much more FSB out of the memory. Already at 5 5 5 15 so you dont want to loosen them much, 5 5 5 18 might get you a little more FSB, not sure you can make the 420 you need for 3.8, all you can do is try.

Bottom line is your memory is going to limit you and soon. 5 7 7 18 might get you there or just leave on timings auto and making sure the memory multiplier is 2.0 see what the board sets (expect some automatic reboot cycles as it trys).

Giving one notch of extra voltage to the FSB reference voltage might help a little. Bottom line is you are about to approach the limit of your memory and it becomes a real trail and error thing now.

Not much more I can say than to try everthing but I wiould take it easy on the memory voltage and stay under 2.1V as I think it is rated for only 2.0V check the manuf page for that exact memory for specs I could be wrong.

 

[devarinti]

He he , I ment my crack about just slapping in some values. I was a bit cranky that day, it comes with watching 20 years of savings get cut in half because of greedy bankers who then get bailed out with my tax money. /bitter, who me ?

Yep yep k, all looks good. Its going to be tricky to get much more FSB out of the memory. Already at 5 5 5 15 so you dont want to loosen them much, 5 5 5 18 might get you a little more FSB, not sure you can make the 420 you need for 3.8, all you can do is try.

Bottom line is your memory is going to limit you and soon. 5 7 7 18 might get you there or just leave on timings auto and making sure the memory multiplier is 2.0 see what the board sets (expect some automatic reboot cycles as it trys).

Giving one notch of extra voltage to the FSB reference voltage might help a little. Bottom line is you are about to approach the limit of your memory and it becomes a real trail and error thing now.

Not much more I can say than to try everthing but I wiould take it easy on the memory voltage and stay under 2.1V as I think it is rated for only 2.0V check the manuf page for that exact memory for specs I could be wrong.

What happens when the latency timings are changed?? Whats the worst case scenario if the timings are pushed too high? I got to boot up and run at 3.726 ghz before it starts failing and resetting back to 3.0.. It doesn't go any higher than 3.726 while the latency is at 5 5 5 15.. I left the vcore at 1.35 and the MCH core at 1.300 and seems to go at 3.726.. doesn't boot up if its the slightest bit higher for some reason.. Just don't wanna like destroy my RAM if the whole latency thing goes bad..