Ram/oc'ing/??? help!

[flxnimprtmscl]

Ok, so I just got my gig of twinmos/winbond PC 3200 today. I go intall it and everything's groovy. So I play a few games for a bit and run prime a bit to make sure everything's good and then I go bump up my fsb a bit (to 146). Here's where it gets good.

I get back into windows no problem and fire up prime torture test. It fails after a couple seconds. So I reboot and fire up memtest and let it run for a bit. It got through three tests and apperently locked up ( I was away) after about an hour and a half. Still it reported no errors. So I go back to windows and fire up prime again and this time it locks. So I go play musical slots (although I was too stupid to think about pulling one of the sticks

) same thing.

So I reboot and windows wont load because it says my system32\config (something or other) file is missing or corupt. So I reboot from the xp cd to use the nifty little repair option. The first couple times I tried it wouldn't load the setup giving me multiple errors "irql driver not less or equal" etc. So I back down my oc down a buch and it finally loads the setup and lets me repair. Reboot again and get all the way to the splash screen before it tells me it can't load the system32\software (or something like that. I really need to write this crap down ) file. So I boot from the cd again, try to repair it several times with no luck.

At this point I figured I had nothing left to lose so I swap back to my old 512Mb stick of kingston PC 2700. And low and behold all my problems disapear. Boots into windows like nothing ever hapened.

Ok, so I have no clue what to make of this. My first thought was corrupted my hdd on acount of my board (asus P4S533) has no pci lock and I was way out of spec (36) when I bumped my oc up. But I ran chkdsk and it came back clean. As far as the memory I'm not sure what the fact that it looped three times with memtest and reported no errors but still locked up means.

Ideas? Having a gig of DDR 400 goodnes and not being able to use it sure would suck

 

[Lord Evermore]

So, after memtest LOCKED UP, you assumed that the fact that it hadn't shown errors up to that point meant it was okay? Did you try setting the memory clock BACK to the default after getting the Windows error (before trying to repair it).

What speed did you have the memory set to? I don't know if any Intel-based boards allow you to set the memory bus higher than 333 with a 133MHz bus (and then maintains that ratio when you overclock the bus).

You definitely should try it with only one module installed at a time (make sure to test both).

The "irql driver" error is common and you should be able to find what it means, either searching here or on Google. Bad memory is the most likely cause.

 

[Blurry]

OOo, you seem to have the same problem as I did.

I had a stick of Generic ddr 333 cas 2.5 ram and it got all funky after I overclocked my FSB past 140MHz.
It seems that you have a damaged memory module. ( However, try testing it on someone's elses comp just to be sure.)
What mem ratio were u using?

 

[flxnimprtmscl]

Update time. I just tested each stick seprately and here's the results. One won't even post. I get asus voice post message "cpu failed due to overclocking" which seems to be their catch all for everything. The second one boots fine but causes random reboots after about 3 minutes of torture test. It doesn't seem real feasible to me that I could have got two sticks of bad ram. And I know I didn't do anything to them because I had my anti-static strap on like I always do when I work on my rig. So is it just maybe possible there's some other underlying problem here??

As far as my ratio for the last set of tests I was running 4:3 with a 142 FSB. Still under what these sticks are rated at. My timings were
2.5 2 2 6 1T.

Thanks guys.