System boot troubles

[Kett]

I have an odd issue with my system cold booting after being off for a while.
When I turn it on, it will attempt to start up, fail, try again, fail, set stock safe settings, and then boot fine. (This is a p35-ds3r, so it resets itself upon failure to boot after 2 tries.) I can then go directly back into the bios and change all the settings back to how they were before it reset itself, exit bios + reboot and it boots up at my OC'd settings like a charm.

The system is overclocked, and from the description it sounds like it just can't handle the OC right? But the weird thing is that its 11+ hours stable in orthos, (I terminated the test before failure) and the temps as reported by TAT, Speedfan, and Bios are fine. It just recently developed this problem too, it did not used to be like this. I was hoping some of you might have a few ideas as to why this is.

System specs:
Board: GA-P35-DS3R (Updated to F6 bios)
CPU: e6420 w/TR-U120x
RAM: 2gb Ballistix 1066
Video: 7950GT 512mb
PSU: Corsair HX620
Case: Antec 900

Other stuff:
-320gb Sata drive
-37gb 15k rpm SCSI on an Adaptec 29160
-2x Sata optical drives

OC:
-e6420 @ 8x437fsb = ~3.5ghz. @ 1.47v (bios)
-Mem @ 4-4-4-12, 1:1. @ 2.2v (bios)
-"Performance Enhance" setting on "Turbo" in Bios. (memset performance level 7)
-Video @ stock
-Everything else @ stock.

I was originally thinking a power issue during bootup, but I dont really want to believe it because the HX620 should be up to the task. It fails initial cold boot after about 5-8 seconds, not quite enough time for my CRT to warm up and show me the boot screens.

Any ideas?

 

[BillParrish]

Ahhh the "classic" lose OC settings on cold boot issue "double boot". A not rare issue with Gigabyte and some other boards. Lots of things tried. Latest thinking is that it is the bios changing the strap on the MCH during startup and it fails for some reason.

No "one shot" cure has been found as far as I know.

Try raising the MCH voltage to +.1 and then +.2 (still far under max voltage for the chips, no worries), probally will not help but you never know.

Raising the PCI-e frequency from auto (100MHz default) to 105 or so has worked for a few people.

Basically a crap shoot to fix. It seems clear that with everything 'cold' there is something about your OC the board does not like. When warm I bet you can shutdown and reboot fine.

Another thing to try is to set all voltages to "auto" and let the board determine them. This will result in a reboot cycle from hell, I give it six trys before I attempt to catch it when it just powers down and flip the power supply off and reset the cmos. This can lead to some fairly high voltages but give it a try and just check them afterwards. It might give a clue as to what voltage the board wants and you can adjust the others back down.

Many users had to RMA the board to finally get a solution. You might want to query Gigabyte tech support in case some "cure" has been found I am not aware of as it seems the issue does not come up nearly as often as it did. Be prepared for a game of "ping pong".

 

[Kett]

It seems clear that with everything 'cold' there is something about your OC the board does not like. When warm I bet you can shutdown and reboot fine.

Truth.

Thanks for the suggestions, I will give some of them a try when I get home tonight.

I tried a few other OC settings last night after I made that post however, Right now I have it sitting at 500x7 @ 1.475, 1:1 5-5-5-15 "turbo" (Plevel 8) and it is not showing the behavior.

I had also tried dropping the FSB on the OC from the first post a couple mhz to 436, 435, etc... at which point it decided not to boot at all.

The strangest thing I thought about the issue with all this is that it did not used to exhibit this behavior when I was originally tuning it. I ran with that 437x8 for about a month or 3 weeks or so before it began resetting itself to defaults on boot.

 

[BillParrish]

oh man 500FSB is so nice, I cannot get past 485 no matter what. Glad you found settings that work. Nothing much more I can say, if you google "DS3 cold boot" or double boot" you will find quite a few people with the issue but no one "cure all" solution. I