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?

 

[GtPrOjEcTX]

did you 2x prime95 test it for X hours at those settings?

 

[Icewind]

No, don't have prime95. Actually, I dunno what the hell that is.

 

[GtPrOjEcTX]

Stability tester. Read the overclocking tools faq.

download here. Install two instances, and run the torture test on them both at the same time. if you don't get any error for 4-5 hours of that it would be considered stable. I'm assuming it was never stable at your overclock.

what did you do to test for stability at that overclock? anything?

 

[Icewind]

I ran U2k3 for max settings for awhile playing, then BF1942 and Star Wars Galaxies for a few hours. Basically if the system runs those perfect, its stable for me.

 

[GtPrOjEcTX]

I can't help but smile.

Obviously you need to change under what conditions you classify something as stable. You did those things and you thought it was stable. Well, it crashed on you because it wasn't stable. Therefore those tests were not good enough.

 

[Slammy1]

Originally posted by: Icewind
I ran U2k3 for max settings for awhile playing, then BF1942 and Star Wars Galaxies for a few hours. Basically if the system runs those perfect, its stable for me.

That's my stage 1 stability testing. My stage 2 is documented, classify stability w/in 2 hrs, but if it's going to fail it almost always does so before I can get it set up.. I haven't had any issues doing it like that, I prefer looped 3dMark tests with a single instance of Prime95 for long term testing. If I ever commit to an o/c I'll focus on some more intense solutions.

 

[Jeff7181]

Woah... deja vu!

 

[4x4expy]

Originally posted by: GtPrOjEcTX
I can't help but smile.

Obviously you need to change under what conditions you classify something as stable. You did those things and you thought it was stable. Well, it crashed on you because it wasn't stable. Therefore those tests were not good enough.

Amen brotha!

 

[Icewind]

Think i'll just leave it at 215 FSB and call it good. Im not gonna risk frying something for the sake of bragging rights. Maybe somtime later i'll switch to 5:4 and go higher.

 

[Icewind]

I can't get this prime 95 thing to run, is there a trick to it?

 

[GtPrOjEcTX]

open it, then under Options, choose Torture test. It will run forever until it either gets an error (which it will stop and tell you the error) or you goto test > stop.