Overclocking and hard drive failure.

[KoolDrew]

A friend of mine just assembled a new rig that consists of an Opteron 165, Biostar 6100-M9, 1GB of DDR333 (he used it from a previous build), and an IDE 60GB Maxtor drive 5400RPM (also used from a previous build).

Since he got an Opteron 165, which are known for overclocking well, and his motherboard had overclocking options he decided to overclock. I overclocked my Sempron socket 754 system without any problems to 2.75Ghz so I decided to help him out. Since I was helping him out we didn't do anything stupid like jumping up the CPU frequency too fast, we took it slow. However, even at 230x9, there was stability problems, so we backed it down. Soon after this it wasn't even stable at a little past stock and then there were all sorts of problems with the OS and everything. It turned out his hard drive failed. He replaced it with a Western Digital 80GB IDE drive and everything seems to work fine now.

Now my question is, was it the overclock that caused it to fail or was the hard drive just dieing anyway? Is it safe for him to begin overclocking with the new drive or will the same thing occur?

 

[GuitarDaddy]

Overclocking can't kill hard drives AFAIK, it can corrupt the data on them and render them useless, requiring a reformat. But if it pysically died it was on it's way out already. He should be fine overclocking with the new HDD.

 

[Aznguy1872]

make sure the pci frequencies are locked to prevent any data corruption.

 

[Sonikku]

Originally posted by: Aznguy1872
make sure the pci frequencies are locked to prevent any data corruption.

How does one do this? >.< In the bios? How?

 

[KoolDrew]

Originally posted by: Aznguy1872
make sure the pci frequencies are locked to prevent any data corruption.

The PCI frequencies really don't budge judging by Clockgen. It only moves from 33.33 to 33.37 or something like that and doesn't go up any further. However, it moves the exact same amount on my PC using clockgen and I've been running a 344 HTT perfectly fine.

After the responses I've gotten on this forum and others we decided to try to overclock it today, but I really don't know what's going on. We set the HT Link multi to 3x, RAM to 100Mhz, and leave the HTT at 200 and stock CPU ultiplier. We boot up, open up clockgen while running Orthos, and right when we hit 205 (I went to 202, let Orthos run for a minute, went to 205) and the computer froze and the screen went blackish with lines going across it. The same thing that happens if you overclock your videos RAM or your system RAM too far (from my experience anyway). That doesn't make sense though as I verified that the RAM was running well below stock using the 100MHz divider. Even though it is DDR333, that still leaves it well below stock.

Any input? Perhaps some timings are messed up that allow the system to boot, but even at below stock frequencies the timings are not stable?

 

[myocardia]

Disable the onboard video, in Windows Device Manager. Onboard video does not like overclocking.

 

[KoolDrew]

Originally posted by: myocardia
Disable the onboard video, in Windows Device Manager. Onboard video does not like overclocking.

Thanks for the suggestion. If I can find somebody who has a spare PCI card, we'll give it a shot.

 

[KoolDrew]

So I've made a list of possibilities that we'll try. Any to add?

• Maybe "optimized defaults" just doesn't work well with your setup. Try clearing the CMOS instead.
• Maybe the board doesn't like its HTT changed within Windows using Clockgen. If this is the case, we should try it through the BIOS only.
• Onboard video just doesn't like overclocking, so find a PCI card and disable onboard and see if it helps
• Power supply is not sustaining adequate clean voltage. Open up Orthos and run it for a few minutes and test using a multimeter. Check to see if voltage is too low and/or voltage fluctuates a lot.
• Try setting RAM to a 133MHz divider instead
• Set memory timings and voltage manually instead of letting the BIOS do it itself.
• Get a stick of PC3200 to try.