Higher voltage settings bad for AMD CPU?

[ProfessorD]

Greetings,

I have a system consisting of an M-Tech R581A mb with an AMD K6 300, and have recently experienced intermittent system crashes. These weren't Windows crashes that I was used to with my computer; these were hardware failures where the screen would go blank but the hard drives would keep spinning and the power light would still be on. Soft reboots wouldn't work so each time I had to restart the system.

Upon restarting, the system usually wouldn't even post, but again, the disks would start spinning and such. Upon opening the case, I also noticed that the CPU fan wouldn't spin when I powered the computer on. After what seemed like hours of poking around, the computer would eventually start back up (for whatever reason I couldn't determine). I could always tell when the system was going to boot correctly because the fan on the CPU would start spinning immediately when I powered the system on. Unfortunately, the system would eventually crash again, which would bring me back to square one.

One time when my system had died, I was playing with the jumpers to see if I could get any life from the computer, I accidentally UNDERclocked the system to 150MHz. To my surprise, the computer booted up immediately! I began to think back to a parallel "trick" I learned about overclocking which states that if your overclocked system is running unstable, then you can give the CPU a little more voltage which may help. I reset the jumpers so that the CPU would run at 300MHz (75MHz x 4), and upped the CPU voltage from 2.2V to 2.3V. I couldn't believe it when I pressed the power button and the system booted right up!! My system has been running solid ever since I did that....but since I would like to get the bottom of this, my questions are:

1) Is running my CPU at 2.3V bad for it in any way?

2) Any ideas what the root of this problem is? Power supply? Bad CPU?

Thanks for any ideas/suggestions that you may have.

Dave

 

[Techwhore]

Well, increasing the voltage does cause some damage, basically just shortening the lifespan of the component. There's no set formula to determine how much damage per percentage increase of voltage is being done, but u've adjusted very little so i'm sure it will be negligable.

As for the root of the problem, I thought it to be a cooling issue, either not enuff or a bad fan/fan connector. But that obviously isn't it, so that leave the cpu or motherboard. I don't know much about the K6 series, but u said your clock speed is 75 MHz FSB and a 4 multiplier? Is that the stock setting for a K6 2 300? Seeing as they run on Intel based chipsets and I've never heard of 75 MHz memory, it would make more sense that the stock settings be 66 x 4.5, like any intel 300 MHz chip. If i'm right, that could be your problem, the cpu may have needed more voltage to handle the higher FSB. But like i said, i don't know much about that series of chips. Lastly, do you have an AGP video card? If so, which one? Some of those cards take up an incredible amount of power from the board, and that can mean power failures for either the card or the CPU, seeing as how both take up the largest percentage of power distribution.

 

[ProfessorD]

Thanks for the info...Yes I'm running a Matrox Productiva G100 AGP card. This is a pretty basic card, do you think it's part of the problem? (1024x768 at 32 bit color)

I'm not sure myself what the stock settings are, but I think those you suggested may be correct. I'll make those changes and lower the voltage to see if that works. Even if that proves to be the problem, I think I'll leave these settings "as is" since the negative impact on the CPU is minimal.

 

[HotWire]

The K6-2 series 300 MhZ AMD processors came in two FSB versions...one 66 MhZ and the other 100 MhZ.......the 66 series chip will have 66 after a series of letters....like... "ADF66.....on the top of the chip and the 100 will be in this same position at the end on its chip top surface.Take your fan off and clean the top surface and see what version you are running.

 

[Techwhore]

As for the video card, i'm sure that's not part of the problem. I was thinking something more recent, like any NVIDIA card from TNT2 on... it's most likely got something to do with that 75 MHz FSB, but if u can get it to work at 2.3v then leave it.