Total P4 system failure, What happend?

[Icewind]

Need some incite guys. Have a P4 2.8c on a P4c800-E paired with 1 gig Corsair 3700xms. Had my system running on 220FSB on 1:1 ratio, 2.75v on the vidimm. My system booted just fine and I was playing GTA Vice City fine for awhile. Then I booted up UT2k3, which ran fine for a few minutes then crashed giving me a strange error message. The game icon itself was corrupted and I couldn't get the game to run again until I rebooted. Then I let my machine sit and when I came back 30 mins, I had a BLACK screen saying "INPUT Bootable OS or disk for system." or somewhere around those lines.

Needless to say, I freaked, thinking I corrupted my HDD data. I shut down all power and let the ASUS Bios do it thing and sure enough it booted and told me OC failed.

Im surious, have I reached the max reliable speed at 1:1 ratio and its time to go to 5:4, or should I check something else? I can't do 2.85v as RAMGUY from Corsair said its not good for the TwinX. The CPu was on default voltage, so I don't see why the cpu should need more as i've seen guys go higher on default voltage. Any ideas of anything I could try or is it time to take my losses on memory bandwith and switch to 5:4 ratio?

 

[Jeff7181]

Wow... mighty P4C bites the big one =)

I'd put everything back at the default settings and reinstall Windows. Normally HDD corruption is due to the PCI bus being clocked too high... but that P4C800 SHOULD lock the PCI frequency. If it still doesn't work right at default settings, you broke something =)

 

[WarCon]

Icewind, I am just curious if you ran any kind of stability tests after you overclocked.

What I have been doing is to turn my memory timings down to the lowest they will go and then start overclocking my processor. That way I minimize the number of variables to stability and maybe minimize the damage an overclock will do to my installation. I then start raising my fsb (keeping minimal timings and a locked apg/pci bus). I keep raising it testing it with Prime95 until it fails within the first minute or so. I then back it down several fsb and test with Prime95 (you will have to open two instances with your C processor with RUN prime.exe -A1 command line argument.) until it is stable for at least 6 hours (some people use 24hrs, but I don't seem to have that much patience.... ).

The next part of the overclock process is to turn up your memory timings after your processor is stable and test with a memtest-86 boot disk (either floppy or bootable CD) for several hours until don't get any errors. I believe the magic keys to press once you are in memtest-86 are C-1-2-2-3-Spacebar, but I may be leaving one out. Those keys enable cache testing and all tests and set a stop once you reach a full screen of errors instead of letting it continue to test memory that may be well over the line of stability.

Once you are stable in both of these (test Prime95 again after you get your memory to its highest stable point), then I suggest running a looped 3DMark or hard core game benchmark to really heat the whole thing as a whole and see if you have any other weak components (like video card or powersupply). Loop that for 6 or so hours and if successful, you can have confidence you won't corrupt your install from an unstable machine.

As far as not having to up your vcore, that is pretty much a factor of how good a processor you got in the first place.

 

[Icewind]

Fudge, I dont' have the time or patience to do all that crap. I"ll just keep it at 3.0ghz and call it good. I"ll leave the insane overclocking to you Godlike Nerds.

 

[fell8]

Mmmmm...Do I smell deep fried hard drive? Yum!

 

[sonoran]

Originally posted by: Icewind
Fudge, I dont' have the time or patience to do all that crap. I"ll just keep it at 3.0ghz and call it good. I"ll leave the insane overclocking to you Godlike Nerds.

Ice, you'd probably get a few hundred more MHz out of that CPU if you switched the memory ratio. My P4C800 Deluxe has no problems at all at 250MHz FSB, but not at 1:1.

 

[Icewind]

Yeah, I think im gonna give that shot. Im just trying decide if I wanna be ballsy and update my BIOS, its at 1007 now, Flashing BIOS always scared me. Afraid its gonna screw something up on my computer that was working fine on 1007. Thing that holds me back from changing the ratio is that I loose my memory bandwith in the process

 

[stevejst]

Im surious, have I reached the max reliable speed at 1:1 ratio and its time to go to 5:4, or should I check something else? I can't do 2.85v as RAMGUY from Corsair said its not good for the TwinX.

That guy was of no help to me with his generic answers. What do you think he would tell you? In general up to 2.9V you should be OK since these are memory sticks with heat spreaders and that reduces the temperature of the stick for 3-4C. The question is how well ventilated your case is.
And as somebody said already my feeling on the first reading was that your HDD went dead. Just use Windows boot disk to see if that happened. If the disk boot, your HDD is dead. Or the motherboard controller, which is not a good sign but it might happen too.

 

[nick1985]

go through all that trouble to squeeze out a few more un-noticable frames man! its worth it! :beer:

 

[Icewind]

Windows is running fine, no futher problems at 215 FSB, damnit...why the heck can other people go higher on 1:1 ratio?

 

[Thor86]

Originally posted by: Icewind
Windows is running fine, no futher problems at 215 FSB, damnit...why the heck can other people go higher on 1:1 ratio?

Because they either have good luck with a good chip, or they know how to overclock properly.

 

[Icewind]

Well what im wondering is what is going on at 220fsb. Seems like other guys are reaching 240fsb on 1:1, and I'd like to go as high as possible to keep my mem bandwith...

 

[Thor86]

Check out the http://www.bleedinedge.com/forums and do some reading on how to test and what settings to play with when overclocking your system. Overclocking isn't an exact science, but there are plenty of information on the right hardware combinations and settings that improve your chances on a sucessfull overclock.

 

[WarCon]

Originally posted by: Icewind
Fudge, I dont' have the time or patience to do all that crap. I"ll just keep it at 3.0ghz and call it good. I"ll leave the insane overclocking to you Godlike Nerds.

Its funny that you would say this, but still keep asking how to get more. Maybe you just want the magic overclocking word?

Sorry its reserved for the Godlike Nerds club, along with the super secret handshake.........

Truth is if you don't bother testing for stability (and doing so in a way that means something), a month (or more) down the road I would expect to be reading a post that goes something like this........."System won't boot, what is wrong?" or "Why does my system keep rebooting?" or even "I smelled smoke, does that mean my computer is dead?".