My "new" rig

[unfaithfulsfan]

Wow.That's a bummer with you being so young when it happened. I was lucky in all my youthful calamities that I didn't have any lingering side effects. Except when I broke my neck at 18. To this day every time I get real cold, my right arm goes numb. Particularly a problem living in Buffalo! My older brother just had a hip replacement after suffering from arthritis for better than 20 years. One of his legs is now about 0.5" shorter than the other because of the bone loss. I've got two metal plates in my leg. One for each bone. They're permanent unfortunately. I'm not sure if I'll need documentation from the doc when I fly home to Mississippi in November.

I figured the backplate did since it's a "back"plate. Thanks I built a dual Xeon rig when I was still working and the board had a backplate for the fans. I'm hoping my paste will be in today so I can finish up my PC and start with the overclocking.

BTW, while I never got out to the shed to get my multi-meter, there were other signs that the PSU was the culprit. I used the DVD drive to load some backed up files to my m-i-l's pc and it worked fine. Now every time I try to use the drive, the pc just hoses up. And I'm still getting "safe mode" messages on boot up even though I'm now under clocked to 2.25. I've ordered another power supply so I'll see if everything clears up. I guess, or I know the drive could be bad but somehow in this case, I doubt it. In both cases I've still got time to return them to Newegg for credit.

Jack

[unfaithfulsfan]

Just a quick question for anyone. My Q9550 was only running at 2.2 GHz (266 x 8.5) before I ran it up in BIOS to its advertised speed of 2.8 (335 x 8.5). Why was it so "slow" out of the box? AND CPU-Z shows only a 6.0 multiplier. What's up with that? Guess that's TWO questions!

Jack

[Major_A]

Have you updated the BIOS? Gigabyte has a nice app called @BIOS that does it all for you in Windows.

[unfaithfulsfan]

Yep. First thing I did. Came with F5 and I updated to F9. I'd read in the reviews in Newegg that this was a problem for a couple of people but the BIOS seemed to resolve it for them.

What's up with the 6 multiplier in CPU-Z when in BIOS it shows 8.5?

Jack

[Major_A]

I can't really help, I just put together a Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P (P45 chipset) motherboard with an E5200 and the multiplier was off in the BIOS too. As far as CPU-Z goes I would just chalk that up to a bug in the software. Try Everest and see if it's giving you the same reading.

http://www.lavalys.com/beta/everestulti ... 1whjqu.zip

[unfaithfulsfan]

Mystified BIOS says 8.5, Everest says 6.0, CPU-ID flickers back and forth between the two. I'm really nervous about doing anything else to it until I get this issue resolved.

Jack

[ibleet]

Have you tried disabling "speedstep" in the bios?

[Major_A]

Good call there ibleet.

[unfaithfulsfan]

I looked high and low for Intel's performance killer but could not find it anywhere in the BIOS. I have Award BIOS with GB's Tweaker. I even tried EasyTune 6 to bring it up to 3.2 and here are the results from all utilities I have--EasyTune, Everest, CPU-ID, and CPUspeed:

[Major_A]

Go to the BIOS section Advanced BIOS Features and disable CPU EIST Function. To see if speedstep is the culprit here put a load on the CPU and open up CPU-Z and see what it says.

[ibleet]

Go to the BIOS section Advanced BIOS Features and disable CPU EIST Function. To see if speedstep is the culprit here put a load on the CPU and open up CPU-Z and see what it says.

Also look for "C1E" (enhanced halt state) in the bios.

[Tech_Greek]

instead of the God awful push-pin setup.

I wish bad things on the people who invented that setup.

[unfaithfulsfan]

Go to the BIOS section Advanced BIOS Features and disable CPU EIST Function. To see if speedstep is the culprit here put a load on the CPU and open up CPU-Z and see what it says.

Also look for "C1E" (enhanced halt state) in the bios.

Thanks a million, ibleet and Major_A. Since I disabled those two functions in BIOS I'm getting consistent speed readings on 3 out of 4 utilities (one I think just makes up a number) and my rig's operation seems much more "crisp," for want of a better word. Apps are launching quicker, FF even seems to be much quicker than it was. I almost feel like I need to slow my mouse down. Or I could just be getting old.

It seems pretty stable at 3.5 so I'm going to let it run for a few days as is and see if any anomalies rear their mutant little heads. Man, this thing seems quicker. Switching between apps is almost scary quick.

Thanks again guys,
Jack