How safe / idiot-proof is the Asus A. I. Overclock Tuner?

[mshan]

I own an Asus P4C800-E rev. 2 Deluxe mobo and Intel Pentium 4 3.0c cpu.

I have 2 x 512 MB Kingston Value RAM PC3200 (Elphida chips), which the Anandtech Value Ram roundup says can do fsb 225 (http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=2392&p=5)

How safe / idiot-proof is the Asus AI Overclock tuner in BIOS for overclocking to fsb 220 (10% overclock).

Do I still risk a corrupted BIOS and should I still boot into MemTest to protect the hard drive?

Any insights would be greatly appreciated!

 

[stevty2889]

Using the AI tuner won't corrupt your BIOS. I would boot in to memtest, not to protect the hard drive, but to make sure your memory is stable after being overclocked. If the overclock is too much to handle, it would probably error out before even getting in to windows, but I've not experienced any hard drive corruption until about a 20% overclock, and returning to lower speeds corrected the issue. Basicly the AI tuner is no differant than the normal method of overclocking, it just lets you do it on a % base, rather than adjusting all the settings manualy.

 

[pm]

As Steve said, the AI just lets you do the overclock based on a percentage... not exactly AI. There is no danger of BIOS corruption.

As far as hard disk corruption, it is always something to be worried about. Overclocking too far essentially creates an error on the chip. You push the clock frequency faster than the ability of the slowest logic path on the chip to produce a result and the results after this occurs are completely unpredictable. Different CPU's will fail due to a different issues when pushed too hard and some can cause data corruption which, when written back to the hard disk, corrupt the data on the hard disk.

 

[mshan]

Would that error just require reformatting a hard drive or reinstalling Windows, or is there any risk of physical damage to the hard drive?

 

[GuitarDaddy]

most of the time just a repair or reinstall of the OS. But on rare occasions it will require a reformat, if the boot sector of the HD gets corrupted.

 

[pm]

I agree with GuitarDaddy. When it happens, it's rare to require a reformat, usually it's just an OS reinstall. Just backup the important stuff just in case. And there's no danger of permanent damage to the disk.

 

[batmanuel]

You can also minimize your chances of losing all your data by putting your data on a different partition than the OS and program files. That way if the Windows install gets corrupted, you can just reformat the OS partition and reinstall without touching the data partition.

It is even easier if you have Norton Ghost - you just create an image of your OS and installed programs that is kept on the data partition. If anything goes wrong, you just run Ghost and 15 minutes or so later you are up and running again. It is especially nice if you have Win XP, because if you Ghost the partition after you activate the OS you won't have to reactivate (with a possible call to MS to get an activation code) after your restore the partition like you would if you do a clean reinstall.