Increasing vcore on Opty 146 causing Windows corruption

[Zeeuw]

Hi, I recently purchased a opty 146 quite cheap and I thought it would be a good upgrade for my 64 3000. It overclocks pretty well to 2400 or so without any increase in anything, but whenever I increase the Vcore on it (twice now, I don't learn that fast) to 1.45 volts or 1.5 volts windows boots up just fine but then it will be "stuck" on the first screen. Afterwards, when I reboot some .sys file is corrupt, following the Microsoft KBs to resolve the issue (by replacing the file in question) won't resolve the issue and I end up reinstalling windows alltogether.
I think this is all because I have an older Gigabyte motherboard which does officially support the 146, but others in the 150-range it does not support.
So maybe the compatibility is limited?

Does this sound familiar to anyone? Does overclocking mess up your windows installation?

 

[Navid]

Did you run stability tests to make sure the system was stable before increasing Vcore?
Did you raise VCore by the smallest step possible?
Did you ensure the system was stable again before raising VCore again?

 

[Zeeuw]

Well, the test whether increasing the vcore was stable was booting windows for starters... and I guess corrupted files constituted a failed test.
I did increase the VCore with the smallest increment possible and the box was stable prior to doing the increase.
Thanks

 

[Navid]

Originally posted by: Zeeuw
Well, the test whether increasing the vcore was stable was booting windows for starters... and I guess corrupted files constituted a failed test.
I did increase the VCore with the smallest increment possible and the box was stable prior to doing the increase.Thanks

That depends on your definition of "stable"!
How did you conclude that it was stable?
Did you run Prime95 for a few hours at least and it ran with no errors?
Did you run memtest for a few hours and it ran with no errors?

 

[RebateMonger]

Historically, installing Windows is a great way to test for memory and other problems in a system. I've seen systems that seemed perfectly stable, but would fail to install Win98 properly because, actually, there was a defective memory module.

Conventional wisdom is to always do your Windows install with ALL overclocking turned OFF.

 

[vanvock]

I've got a 146 @ 2.5 no prob. Did you use a mem divider & or turn down on the HTT multi?

 

[Zeeuw]

I got had the mem divider and the HTT multi adjusted so they were not impacted and had everything up and running just fine on Sunday at 2.5 ghz, played Never winter nights 2 for 3 hours or so.
Monday morning I had an issue with my wireless network card and it's DHCP lease from the network router. Reinstalled some drivers and tried to test Company of Heroes so I could run some multiplayer with my brother. For some reason, the Company of Heroes update locked up and I managed to shut down the box without having to pull the plug.
When I booted up again, a couple of files were missing again in windows which included explorer.exe, did the windows xp cd recovery console and looked for it and it was gone. Running the setup and then "Repair" windows did not proceed beyond a point after "installing drivers", I ran norton disc doctor from my Norton Recovery disk and apparently everything was cool. Booting into windows worked fine, but I could not do much due to the missing explorer.exe and some other issues. Now I was not sure if it my network card, my harddisk or the windows version I used. Frustrated, I decided to play around with Never winter nights 1 on my laptop instead for a while and get back with it later.
My wife noticed a one year 0% apr deal on Dell XPS systems and applied and we got approved so I bought a Duo core XPS 410 instead and I am parting out my box on Ebay.

Can't believe some of the bids on ebay though, some of these people obviously do not know about newegg and tigerdirect and such.