What would make an OC unstable?

[lopri]

Well, I think we are taking a CPU's health for way too granted. I admit that it's for good reasons, but sometimes I wonder how many folks go through endless trouble-shooting and RMAs after excluding the possibility of a problematic CPU. If you have an access to another C2D, by all means install and test it.

 

[crydee]

I ran it at default specs like you said jackwhitter, 1 hour on test #5 no errors, but 5hours on the default tests it goes through and on #7 it just failed with 82 errors. RMA yes? I bought this off Newegg should I go through them or Crucial?

For future reference was 2.25 really abusive when I had it OC'd until the problem? The spec is 2.2 so I thought to try it to 2.3 only for a short period when I was trying to diagnose my problem with the crashes and orthos blend failing.

 

[myocardia]

Originally posted by: crydee
For future reference was 2.25 really abusive when I had it OC'd until the problem? The spec is 2.2 so I thought to try it to 2.3 only for a short period when I was trying to diagnose my problem with the crashes and orthos blend failing.

No, especially not since your BIOS had no 2.20 vdimm setting. Isn't that what you said?

edit: BTW, you do realize that most of the time that it takes something that long to fail, that it's failing because of heat, don't you? Try it at default timings with the side of the case open, or with an 80mm fan blowing on the RAM, and it probably won't fail.

 

[crydee]

Correct the P5B-Deluxe and I am running a recent bios release has no 2.2 vdimm setting. Any clues about this rma though and if I should follow through to newegg or crucial for a RMA?

 

[jackwhitter]

that much time, i would go straight through crucial. their rma is nearly as painless as newegg's. make sure you tell them that it will not run its rated settings. another .5 volts over should not have done that much damage... most boards are +/- 5% or so anyways. i would expect crucial to have built a margin of error into that rating. had you been running them at 2.4+ then you are really starting to out spec them.

 

[myocardia]

Originally posted by: jackwhitter
that much time, i would go straight through crucial. their rma is nearly as painless as newegg's. make sure you tell them that it will not run its rated settings. another .5 volts over should not have done that much damage... most boards are +/- 5% or so anyways. i would expect crucial to have built a margin of error into that rating. had you been running them at 2.4+ then you are really starting to out spec them.

Just to clarify, for people who read this thread, and didn't know any better: Jack meant .05 volts over their rated spec., not .5 volts. Because ½ a volt over spec. will kill nearly all RAM, most instantaneously.*



*Yes, we all know that, properly cooled, BH-5 (and BH-6, for that matter) can take some outrageous voltages.

 

[jackwhitter]

oops, yes. .05 volts. nice catch myocardia

 

[VirtualLarry]

I had some PNY DDR PC3200 RAM die on me once. It wasn't overclocked nor overvolted. It just randomly went, in an 845PE board. First time that I've had RAM actively die on me.
I have this sneaking suspicion that the quality of the chips used on DIMMs today aren't as high as they used to be.

 

[jackwhitter]

quality is the same or likely better, but the complexity has increased greatly...

 

[MintBoy]

I had this sort of problem with an e6300 and a Biostar P965PT. It turned out the shite northbridge heatsink just wasn't sufficient so it was replaced with a Zalman NBF47 cooler. The problems have gone away and even allowed me to set the MCH voltage higher than stock.

Most northbridge coolers on 965 based motherboards are complete garbage. Maybe try having a fan blow air across the NB on your asus board to see if that helps.

 

[crydee]

Even when opening Warcraft 3 I get a FATAL ERROR! "The instruction at 0xxxxxxxx referenced memory at 0x00000020." The memory could not be 'read'. Press ok to terminate application. This is running it at default specs so I'm pretty sure it's the RAM and going to rma this stuff.

 

[nerp]

Crucial RMA is pretty decent. They generally will swap em without a complaint. Lifetime guarentee is nice.

I had some ballistix DDR500 way back that crapped out on me after about 8 months of use. New pair was from a new revision. No problems since.