Core2Duo Overclock . . .What have I forgotten?

[WildW]

I'm having a blonde moment trying to overclock an E5400 (13.5 x 200MHz = 2.7GHz @ stock) on a Gigabyte GA-G31-ES2L motherboard (yes, I know it's cheap.) This is a new build, just put together and with Vista installed, working fine. Idle temps around 35 degrees under Arctic cooling freezer thingy.

I should start by saying I have done this before, on almost identical kit - I had an E5200 rig that I got to 3.5GHz on a cheap Gigabyte G31 board and it's still happy there 6 months later. This new one is having none of it.

I've disabled C1E and EIST in the bios. When I go to tweak CPU speed settings I've turned down the multiplier to 6, locked PCI-Express bus to 100MHz, tweaked VCore to 1.35V, given the northbridge and ram a little more volts, turned down the memory divider. . . I'm just trying to raise the FSB to see how far it will go with everything else at less than stock speed. Pretty normal stuff.

I know the motherboard can go up to much higher FSB speeds as it supports processors up to 1333MHz FSB. However, if I raise the FSB from 200 to 201MHz, it fails to POST, and the BIOS resets everything to stock on the 2nd boot.

So do I have the worst CPU ever that barely made the grade? Or the worst motherboard? Have I forgotten something obvious that I can't think of right now? Motherboard BIOS is updated to the most recent. Tried with on-board graphics and with a discrete card.

My ultra-budget gaming rig is going to be epic fail if it won't overclock by 1 lousy MHz


Edit: a bit of Googling is showing a few similar threads on this board. Some people are getting great overclocks, but a few can't increase FSB at all. Common factors seem to be DDR2-800 ram, and Corsair ram. . . . so, my Corsair DDR2-800 ram is making me nervous. Will try swapping the ram with my GF's PC, get back my faster Mushkin ram.

 

[SpeedEng66]

sorry! nm cant read lol

 

[WildW]

Okay, I've found a way around this problem. . . just time to update the thread so the next poor fool on a Google quest for Gigabyte GA-G31M-ES2L that won't overclock can find something useful.

I managed to get the board to allow overclocking by doing the following:

Swapped DDR2-800 for faster Mushkin DDR2-1000 . . .though I don't think this was the real issue necessarily. Once I'd swapped the ram I was able to overclock while staying at the 4x memory multiplier (200MHz x 4). . .though not in small sensible steps like 10. . . jumping straight to 250 worked fine.

Disabled USB Legacy keyboard/mouse/storage support in the BIOS. This was the thing that allowed me to select the other memory multipliers/dividers without the thing just rebooting.

My E5400 is so far clocked higher than my E5200 would ever do stable, on less volts and lower temps. The future is bright 8)

 

[Ayah]

What is it running at right now?

About the USB Legacy support, does that mean that you need to use a PS/2 keyboard to tinker with the BIOS?

 

[WildW]

3.6 at the moment, my old E5200 was never quite stable there. Still low temps and more VCore headroom to go. . . looks promising.

USB keyboard still works fine in the BIOS. . .must just be for if I run anything DOSish. Not likely to be a problem. Totally random thing to disable to fix the thing - found the suggestion on another forum post about the same problem on the same motherboard. Just a bios bug I guess.

 

[WildW]

For the record, the G31M-ES2L is a sucky overclocker. My old board (Gigabyte G31M-S2L) had none of the freaky overclocking issues that the newer "Energy Effecient" board had.

The really odd one was revealed to me when I installed a temporary Windows on an old IDE hard disk to try out overclocking with - the idea being that any bluescreens and reboots wouldn't cause disk errors on my "good" Windows 7 install.

All was going fine, got a nice stable 300MHz FSB and 12 Multiplier for 3.6GHz, which landed right on the right values for the memory dividers, leaving my DDR2-1000 running at stock speed. Switched back to my SATA drives and the computer won't post. Switch back to IDE, it works fine. Connect an SATA drive. . . it won't post.

Basically I'm maxed out at 267 x 13.5 = 3.6GHz if I want to use SATA drives. The board is totally random, but I guess what else can you expect for a cheapest-in-the-shop motherboard. My opinion of Gigabyte has suffered a little. I've never seen such a random collection of behaviour from a motherboard.

Then again, Prime95 has run fine for many hours at 3.6GHz, on a £50 CPU on a £30 motherboard. . . a cheap combo indeed. Gaming performance is excellent. I picked up a GTS250 on eBay for £40, 4GB DDR2 for £40. The only bits I started out with were a cheap case, so-so PSU and my beloved OCZ Vertex. Overall the exercise has been a resounding cheap success. Until it goes pop