x2 3800+ overclocking woes

G

Glacian22

Gawd
Joined
Jan 27, 2006
Messages
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So I made myself this shiny new system, featuring an x2 3800+ running on a biostar TForce Ultra mobo. Good so far. The woe comes in with the overclocking. I had it overclocked for about a week at 2.3ghz at stock voltage with absolutely no problems whatsoever (dual prime95 stable at 10 hours), and then I decided to try for 2.4. Crash, windows screwed, had to reinstall XP. So then once I have everything back up and running at stock speeds again, I try to just bring it up to 2.3 again. Crash, windows screwed, had to reinstall XP. I am, at this point, royally pissed off. Before I try overclocking again, I back up an image of my harddrive to DVD so I won't have to reinstall frikkin windows again if it keeps getting screwed. This time I go slowly, overclocking in tiny 100mhz increments to be on the safe side and hopefully catch whatever is going on! So I bring my CPU up to 2.1 in the BIOS, reboot, and TADA! windows screwed again, and then the system won't even power on, had to use the reset jumper on the mobo (very useful) to get it to power up again. Now I have had it running at the stock 2.0Ghz, absolutely fine for the past 2 weeks, and am getting the overclocking urge again...can anyone tell me wtf is going on in my machine? This was my first overclocking experience, and I feel violated.
One other thing, the TForceUltra has an auto-overclock option which I tried out after the last reinstall, and on medium it brought the CPU up to 2.3, but with a voltage boost of .2! This seems extremely overkill to me, so I brought everything back down to stock.
 
What kind of hard drive do you have?

The exact same thing happened to me when I overclocked and my SATA drive was on the chipset's SATA controller. I moved the drives to the SATA ports on the Silicon Image controller, locked the PCI bus to 33MHz, and have never had that happen to me again.

Also, please bear in mind that every chip won't get a stellar overclock. The only reason you hear about X2's at 2.8GHz is because only the people who achieve that kind of OC post their results. You have a hundred dud overclocks for every one stellar overclock that someone brags about.
 
I think you're spot on, as I'm running a WD sata drive, and I've had some issues with the drivers. When I first installed windows I loaded them in via floppy, and it overclocked fine...but after that I used a custom winXP disc with the drivers slipstreamed on, maybe I made a mistake there and that caused the problems I've had. Time to test the theory, thanks!
 
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