Overclock works for years, then no longer does?

Obsoleet

Platinum Member
Oct 2, 2007
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I ran 3ghz on stock vid with my Q9450 since April of '08, and lately it sometimes doesn't boot (hangs at the Asus bios screen) or will lockup while it's on all day. I'm guessing that more voltage will fix this, but I don't believe in OC'ing past stock volts (seen it actually slow down my benchmarks too much and requires too much of my time). From now on I'll probably just shell out the extra couple hundred bucks to get the speed I want even if it's $700 instead of a $400 cpu.

I did replace the PSU recently as it was making a high pitched sound under high loads and that seems to have gone away now for the most part.

Fill me in on what I'm missing on OCs failing over time

This is my rig-
Intel Core2Quad 9450 @ 3ghz (stock vid)
8GB Mushkin XP2-6400 (4-4-4-12)
Asus P5Q-E (P45 / ICH10R) bios 2101
MSI Radeon 5870
OCZ Vertex 60GB + 1TB Seagate 7200.11
AC Freezer 7 Pro
Corsair 620HX
Antec 900
Logitech G3 / Access 600 kb / SteelSeries QcK+
Asus VW266H + Dell 2005FPW
Windows 7 Pro 64
 
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MagickMan

Diamond Member
Aug 11, 2008
7,537
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76
I had to adjust my CPU voltage slightly when I changed PSU brands, I was having the same issue. Just bump up your core voltage one notch and it may fix the problem.
 

Zap

Elite Member
Oct 13, 1999
22,377
2
81
Have you tried cleaning out the dust from your fans and heatsinks?
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
21,583
10,785
136
It could be that your new PSU has introduced undesirable ripple or voltage droops on the 12v line at certain loads. Or it could be that electron migration has degraded your processor to the point that it no longer likes being overclocked as much as it once did. Chances are you'll either have to overvolt a bit or bring your clockspeed down a hair to regain stability.
 

MrK6

Diamond Member
Aug 9, 2004
4,458
4
81
I ran 3ghz on stock vid with my Q9450 since April of '08, and lately it sometimes doesn't boot (hangs at the Asus bios screen) or will lockup while it's on all day. I'm guessing that more voltage will fix this, but I don't believe in OC'ing past stock volts (seen it actually slow down my benchmarks too much and requires too much of my time). From now on I'll probably just shell out the extra couple hundred bucks to get the speed I want even if it's $700 instead of a $400 cpu.
Overvolting within limits will not "slow down" anything. Did you originally test your overclock to make sure it was stable?

It could be that your new PSU has introduced undesirable ripple or voltage droops on the 12v line at certain loads. Or it could be that electron migration has degraded your processor to the point that it no longer likes being overclocked as much as it once did. Chances are you'll either have to overvolt a bit or bring your clockspeed down a hair to regain stability.
Either would be my guess. Especially if the OP didn't originally test the overclock for stability. If it was right on the edge, degradation over time is more than enough to push it to the other side of the fence.
 

Obsoleet

Platinum Member
Oct 2, 2007
2,181
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Have you tried cleaning out the dust from your fans and heatsinks?

Every year. It was just done 1 month ago.

Overvolting within limits will not "slow down" anything. Did you originally test your overclock to make sure it was stable?

Either would be my guess. Especially if the OP didn't originally test the overclock for stability. If it was right on the edge, degradation over time is more than enough to push it to the other side of the fence.

It was rock solid stable. No slow downs, no stutters. I was referring to the olden days when I'd OC and pushed Athlons too hard, it seemed to have adverse effects on benchmarks and games. What I was doing to the Q9450 was well within limits of the chip and PSU (2.66 to 3ghz on stock).

I found some CPU scaling benchmarks and at 1920 it doesnt matter what my CPU speed is as long as it's a modern quadcore.

It could be that your new PSU has introduced undesirable ripple or voltage droops on the 12v line at certain loads. Or it could be that electron migration has degraded your processor to the point that it no longer likes being overclocked as much as it once did. Chances are you'll either have to overvolt a bit or bring your clockspeed down a hair to regain stability.

It did it on the PSU that was in there before (same model).
 

MrK6

Diamond Member
Aug 9, 2004
4,458
4
81
It was rock solid stable. No slow downs, no stutters. I was referring to the olden days when I'd OC and pushed Athlons too hard, it seemed to have adverse effects on benchmarks and games. What I was doing to the Q9450 was well within limits of the chip and PSU (2.66 to 3ghz on stock).
But did you do any testing? Did you run Prime95/OCCT for 24 hours straight and did it pass?

I found some CPU scaling benchmarks and at 1920 it doesnt matter what my CPU speed is as long as it's a modern quadcore.
If you're referring to gaming, then no, CPU scaling and "bottlenecking" is completely dependent on the application tested and will vary from game to game. If you're only playing the games being tested in the review, then that is a valid conclusion. However, there are some very CPU-dependent games out there.

I would advise you to stability test your current settings (3GHz, stock voltage) with Prime95 or OCCT and see if you can at least get 12 hours out of it. If you can't, you aren't stable (and might not have ever been), and you will need readjust your settings.
 

Obsoleet

Platinum Member
Oct 2, 2007
2,181
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I don't remember if I ran Prime95 on this machine or not, I've used Prime95 a lot in the past on a lot of machines.

The benchmarks I looked at were a German site and very good. It showed old games like WoW and CSS being very CPU dependent, but they are so old that we're talking 100+FPS anyway.

On the games that matter like Farcry 2 or anything relatively recent, the video card seemed to be the bottleneck. Looking at my games, I think I'll be fine as long as I keep a quadcore.
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
21,583
10,785
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It did it on the PSU that was in there before (same model).

Then I'm going to go with electron migration. Drop your CPU speed by 50-100 mhz or bump vcore up by the smallest increment possible and it should be okay.
 

SanDiegoPC

Senior member
Jul 14, 2006
460
0
0
It's your PSU. Replace with the same power supply you used originally and use the same settings.