HELP!! -- What's up with my rig??? Won't go to 1.8 ghz anymore!!

[skrill]

Well something is up. As you may have seen in my thread from yesterday -- Here -- I picked up an XP 1800+ and was able to tweak it out to 1.8 ghz (156 FSB).

Well, I ran totally stable at that speed -- rebooted several times at that speed yesterday -- and ran several benches to prove stability.

Then today when I go to boot -- "Window Protection Error" -- I figured, oh well, I will see how Windows XP handles the O/C (I had been O/C'ing in Win ME -- say what you like, but I like ME -- and it wont boot without getting various Blue SOD's) -- I have a dual boot.

Then, when I went back to Windows ME I couldn't boot until I backed down to 150 FSB. Also, my I had to reinstall my Geforce 3 Detonator 4's (everything was showing up in 640x480 -- like Standard VGA). Crazy.

Well, I got everything running (reinstalled Detonators) -- but Windows ME still wont boot at 156 FSB or 155 FSB. And Windows XP doesn't like any O/C's it seems. Are my OS's corrupted. XP runs as stock, and ME runs at 150 FSB (I haven't extensively tested -- but these are rough and ready)

Nothing else has changed -- what the hell happened?? Why am i getting "protection errors" when yesterday everything was fine?? I had to reset my CMOS at one point -- could that be a problem?? (I thought I changed everything back to my preferred settings -- RAM, etc.).

Voltages are the same! Temps! Everything!

I can't believe that a CPU that did 1.8 ghz 24 hours ago -- suddenly decided to no longer cooperate. (It POST' s fine BTW)

Please, give me your thoughts.

BTW: Today (Saturday) I am taking my G/F to Disneyland -- don't laugh -- if I keep the lady happy, she lets me play (and spend money) on the Rig (my other woman). Maybe my rig is jealous??!!

Thanks in advance. Have a good weekend.

 

[Jwyatt]

It was great seeing you able to push the envelope on the new XP yesterday. It sounds like the corrupt OS thingy, but im not 100% sure of that.

Good Luck getting it working @ 156 again.

 

[ElectricReaver]

This does sound like an operating system corruption issue. I've had this happen before when my RAM was was having trouble at the overclocked FSB. If I did a shutdown in windows at the overclocked speed, the next time I tried to boot up I would have the "Windows Protection Error". Backing off the CAS latency might help but if it's not the RAM, I don't know what else to tell you.

 

[Ajay]

The other thing that can go wrong is overclocking the PCI bus, specifically, the built in IDE controller. At higher speeds the built in error checking in the ATA 66/100 specs starts breaking down (the algorithym can't ckeck all the data). So if some of the data gets corrupted, it get past the IDE error checking and now you have bad data on your hard drive. If that data has anything to do with the system - you will see all sorts of fun errors. Hopefully the palys were validated above 1.8 GHZ (otherwise there could be inernal cpu errors at higher speeds).

-AJ

 

[PieDerro]

I've been following your post about your overclocking adventures with your new XP and it sucks that this has happened. But this similar thing happened to me with my Athlon 1.2 about 6 months ago.

First day I got it I got it working and started pushing for higher and higher speeds. I got to 1466 pretty quickly, and there it worked beatifully for the entire first day of my new toy! But the next day, it failed to even post at that speed (that was on a 133MHz bus btw) so I set the speed lower and lower until I got it to run stably at 1370MHz... which is where I'm still at now. The stupid thing is, that I only needed 1.8V to run it at 1466 originally, and I can't even get the CPU to post at 1420 now with voltage at 1.89V... so that stinks!!!

But yeah, I have no clue as to why that happened... seems like a "reverse burn-in" effect or something. Another thing, my Motherboard (KT7A) won't post about 140MHz FSB no matter what speed the CPU is running at... I hate this board!!! I want DDR KT266A... tho I'm a bit scared of VIA... why can't AMD release a super fast chipset?????? :|

oh well, the only possible explanation that I have is that internal circuitry in the CPU gets "dirty" as it is subjected to continued use... but I'm no electrical engineer, so odds are I'm waaaay off the mark.

Good luck in getting your speed back tho!!

-PieDerro

 

[smp]

Yeah.. I'm thinking hard drive too.
I just built a system for a friend and we were getting similar errors trying to install win2k on his machine at stock speed, this file on your hard drive is not a valid windows file etc.. so it turns out it was the ram. So first I'de suspect that your hard drive isn't liking the high fsb, and then I'de blame the ram. It looks like you might need to reinstall though in any case.

 

[skrill]

But don't you find it odd that I can get into both ME and XP at 150 fsb. If something is truly corrupted -- wouldn't it just not work at all???

 

[Ajay]

Good point, the data corruption should go away once you dropped the fsb. If it wont' recover at all, then it seems like some hardware component has been damaged. Hopefully you can someone with alot of OCing experience to reply. That, or try the overclocking forums at overclockers.com or hardocp.

It's tough to be on the bleeding edge!

Good luck!

-AJ