WARNING: don't set FSB to 400 MHZ on E6600 / GA-965P-DS4...

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superfrank

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Sep 12, 2007
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I have a Gigabyte GA-965P-DS4 motherboard and the E6600 (2.4GHz core 2 duo). Last night I was fiddling in BIOS settings trying to find a setting that would make Linux recognise the IDE controller. During the process I inadvertently caused the machine to boot up with a clock speed of ~1.6GHz instead of 2.4GHz. Due to a failure of mental arithmetic and common sense (and partly due to the fact I had drunk a beer or two), my solution was to set the multiplier to 8 and the FSB to 400MHz. Yes yes, in hindsight its very obvious that I don't have a 3.2GHz chip with 600MHz RAM!

Anyway as you may be able to guess, when I rebooted the machine with these idiotic settings, it failed to boot, and the lights on the front panel were flashing on and off. I quickly realised my mistake and knew that I would have to reset the CMOS to get it working again. Well after I did this the machine still would not boot up - instead, it switches on for about 10s then switches off for about 5s and repeats this ad infinitum.

At this stage I expect that I have fried either the CPU, the RAM or the motherboard......its gonna be a pain working out which one is dead though!
 
I would not worry. I don't think you have fried anything. What I would do is.

1. Unplug your power supply.
2. Turn off the switch to the power supply
3. Remove both sticks of ram
4. Jumper the cmos
5. Remove the battery
6. Unjumper the cmos
7. Install cmos battery
8. Install 1 stick of ram

Boot back up and see if that works. If not, try same thing except remove video card. I can't say for sure if this will help or not, but I have had similiar problems with my gigabyte p35 board and none of the components were fried.

Good luck
 
Leman said:
Don't remove the battery. Just clear it.
Click to expand...

why not? unplug PSU, REMOVE battery, that way you're 100% sure the CMOS isn't getting power.......... it's not a difficult procedure to take the battery out.......... :rolleyes:
 
I've always read that removing the CMOS battery could cause... I can't remember what, but bottom line is that it wiped/fried the ROM.

Besides, isn't that what the jumper does? I'd assume it just cuts off power to the CMOS.
 
Leman said:
I've always read that removing the CMOS battery could cause... I can't remember what, but bottom line is that it wiped/fried the ROM.

Besides, isn't that what the jumper does? I'd assume it just cuts off power to the CMOS.
Click to expand...

it shouldn't, thats the hole point of having a removable battery
 
Thanks for the advice.

The CMOS is definitely reset and last night I tried booting:
* without a graphics card (same problem occurred)
* without RAM (same problem occurred)

So I'm fairly confident its the motherboard or the CPU thats broken, as I would expect the machine to stay on while giving error beeps if there was a problem with either the graphics card or the RAM.

Now on the overclocking results table in this thread, I can see that at least one person has got the same CPU/motherboard up to 3.4GHz, but they've presumably used the 9x multiplier which would indicate an FSB of 377.

The question is - is the cpu or motherboard more likely to fail at an FSB of 400?
 
Its the board. It should not have done that, after about 4 reboot tries it should have reset to factory and CPU defaults and been fine.


The power cycling is normal, the board is trying to find settings that will allow it to boot. However after about 4 -5 tries and it will not boot and the cmos clear will not get it back, you are in trouble. The bios is most likely corrupt. A cmos clear SHOULD have fixed it but this problem is not rare.

All you can do is try 2 things.

Pull the battery and jumper the cmos to clear and let it sit overnight.

Then

Put a copy of the bios file on a CD and/or floppy and hope the boot block loader will find it during the reboot cycle and load it.

Both have some limited success.

If no joy, RMA the board.
(you cant hurt the cpu, with what you did. It has internal protections )
 
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