If Unstable will Bios...

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

If an overclock is unstable can it effect the bios? I recently picked up an X5660 and it seems to be purring along smoothly. No BSODs but some odd bios things going on lately. I am able to set the multiplier to 23 in bios. I had my BCLK running at 161 with the vcore bumped up a little to 1.23vCore, and after a few reboots and a few hrs later I noticed the multiplier had changed from 23 to 21. I never went into the bios and changed that setting. I've since lowered the overclock from 3.7Ghz to 3.4Ghz and the core temps still seem a little high (might re-apply AS5 later today) I've re-downloaded the bios and might re-install it later on today if things flake out again.. So what do you think? Is it possible for an OC to cause a bios to flake out?

 

[Burpo]

Definitely not.. I knew when you posted that you had 23 locked that it wasn't. The bios may show you max turbo multi, but won't lock it. 22 is most you can set w/this chip & then only with some boards
What happened to this?
"The only issue I have is the temp readings of the cores. They are back down to the teens and single digit Celsius readings "

These chips do run cool, but not when you push them. I don't sweat it tho as long as it's below Tj.Max.. Intel says you can't burn these Xeon's up, even at 1.5 volts. They will just throttle..

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

Definitely not.. I knew when you posted that you had 23 locked that it wasn't. The bios may show you max turbo multi, but won't lock it. 22 is most you can set w/this chip & then only with some boards
What happened to this?
"The only issue I have is the temp readings of the cores. They are back down to the teens and single digit Celsius readings "

These chips do run cool, but not when you push them. I don't sweat it tho as long as it's below Tj.Max.. Intel says you can't burn these Xeon's up, even at 1.5 volts. They will just throttle..

The 24x can't be locked. I have the 23x locked. I returned the dead X5650 and bought an X5660. And the issue with temp readings was from an outdated HWmonitor version. Temps are reading about average to what my i7 970 reads.

 

[Burpo]

Oh ok, the X5660 does have 1X higher multi, but still won't effect bios from overclocking..

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

I wonder why it did this. And I did have another issue when I first installed the chip. I did a battery pull before the whole swap-out procedure so I had to re-install my settings and I'm pretty sure I didn't enable power saving features in the bios and the next boot around It was enabled. I usually double check my ALL my bios settings too.

:hmm:

 

[dkm777]

I had a similar mishap a couple weeks ago. I have a Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD5 with an i7 980 and was experimenting to see which BIOS version was the least buggy. When I tried the last non-beta something a little worse happened - my OC settings were all random after one boot-up. When I tried to correct them the PC shut down. After powering up there was no POST followed by a few restarts, still with no POST. After that there was a message that the BIOS was corrupt and DualBIOS was reflashing from backup (phew). I then flashed an older version and it's smooth sailing from now on. I suggest you do the same - try a few versions (from the ones that support your CPU, of course). In my case the last version ever released lead to totally random BSODs, one earlier broke sleep, and an earlier still did what I just described. So I'm now running a fairly old version and I'm finally happy with this machine.

 

[coffeejunkee]

Did you by any chance disable Turbo Boost? It needs to be enabled to use the turbo multiplier. Also need to disable c-states, otherwise it will boost to x24. Bad for idle power though.

Another possibility is the mobo is throttling. Use ThrottleStop to check.