OC'ing help on Q6600 & Striker Extreme

[BonzaiDuck]

If you say the solder pins show "the burnies," then that's probably what happened.

The other thing: the risk that the monitored voltage understated the real voltage, when you had it up there at 1.5V-something.

I've read some customer-review posts and forum posts, though, about this "CPU-INIT" message and failure to post. I'm wondering how it happened.

Failure to post -- a blank screen -- can result from any number of things. It happened to me with a bad BIOS flash, and I replaced the BIOS chip -- no problem. Then it happened because a memory module went south.

Be sure and test your other parts, if you can, before trashing the motherboard.

You could try a Gigabyte motherboard. I'm not really totally soured on ASUS yet: a lot of people here are using later-model ASUS boards with P35 and newer chipsets. But I see that Gigabyte has a growing and mature reputation now.

Waiting for the county court to evict my tenant in Virginia right now, and missing the rent proceeds, I'd be tempted to offer you my "not even used" spare Striker and Crucials for a fair price, but I think I'll just go forward with my plan to build a VISTA-64 system out of it, and leave this one "as is."

You've been through enough misery with this, you're both inclined -- and probably better off -- trying something different. And maybe a board with a newer Intel chipset.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Next time, trim the solder pins off the underside of the board, and coat the backplate with a layer of silicone-rubber adhesive-sealant from an auto-parts store.

 

[Idontcare]

I swapped out every component, its just a dead mobo. Yeah I learned about what to do with the solder pins after I discovered they were the issue.

Of course my vapochill backplate has since been transformed into a vinyl electrical tape encapsulated backplate as well

Alas by the time I had fixed the problem the board had long since been shockered the bejesus out of itself.

I can't really blame the board's lengthy death spasms on the board itself, but ASUS really did their customers a disservice with those longass solder pins. I wasn't the only person to report this experience...

At any rate I guess I am not done with ASUS, just ordered the P5E-Pro to replace the striker. (Thanks Yoxxy!)

 

[The-Noid]

Good choice on the board it is quite stable overall and overclocks like a champ!

Striker was a good board, if you were running SLI. That board however pissed me off like none other for the 4 or 5 months I ran it.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

In hindsight, I guess that would explain your troubles OC'ing the sucker.

I make choices for components -- usually with great deliberation. I'd been looking at i975 boards in 2006, and my usual practice would've been to stick with Intel chipsets, even if the board was made by ASUS. In fact, I would've picked an ASUS over the BAD-AXE or similar.

My friend up the hill had mentioned the Striker with enthusiasm, and I was muttering that it was a puerile name to give a motherboard, and very pricey. Then my friend flip-flopped after reading some initial forum posts, and went with the 965 Commando board.

For me, I was looking for just so many PCI-E slots in certain positions on the board. I wanted 8-cycle voltage regulation, and some other features it offered. I wanted the 46-some-odd PCI-E lanes. I was ambivalent. I couldn't be sure . . . . I thought it was risky for the price. And I started watching the forum and reseller cust-reviews for info about BIOS changes and various other experiences with it.

On the down side, some people have complained about "FSB holes" in the 680i offerings and FSB limitations. On the up side, it's been very stable for me from the git-go, and I over-clock with caution, anyway. I was going to swing for water-cooling, but came to the conclusion that the benefits just mean that you'll kill the CPU with voltage most likely. And my idea of over-clocking is to first find the maximum for VCORE that is just within your comfort level, and then drop back on the extreme settings enough so that most of the stress is on the CPU alone and the VCORE is less than 5% over the idle setting needed to get SET_VOLTS - VDROOP = 1%_over_maximum_Spec.

In Idontcare's case -- and I'm not all that electrically savvy -- I speculate that the higher he pushed the voltage, with those solder pins touching the (probably painted) surface of the backplate, the electrical shorts became more certain.

 

[Idontcare]

Yeah in retrospect my striker really took a beating electrical shorting wise. It's not just the higher applied voltages in combination with Asetek's poorly designed vapochil backplate and Asus's ridiculously long solder pins...you have to factor in the condensation involved with vaporphase cooling.

Water + pre-existing poor electrical margin = double the trouble. The more I look at the backside of my poor striker board the more I see where trouble had been brewing.

Really I guess I should be impressed with how much the board took over the past year. It was running 100% loaded 24/7 for >12 months on a B3 quad at 3.73GHz. I guess I should feel like I got my money worth from it