Overclocking Rant

[pwcmed]

So I bought a Biostar Tpower I45 and threw in my E8400 and overclocked to 3.8. Ran Prime95 for about 24 Hours with no errors. Once I start gaming is where my troubles begin. Every game stutters like crazy to point where I have to ctrl alt del out of the game. I ran ATI Tool to see if I get any artifacts and I do, not just a couple but an a$$ loads. I was so flustered that I almost bought this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814102801. I contained myself and just went back down to 3.0Ghz and surprise it's now artifact free. Maybe I should shot for 3.6Ghz

[DMB2000uk]

Did you also memtest86+ your RAM at 3.8Ghz?

Dan

[pwcmed]

Yea it did three passes. Maybe I should just let it run all night.

[DMB2000uk]

Is your PCIe bus locked to 100Mhz? I don't know if there is a program to check what speed it is running at from within windows, but it would be a good idea to try and get hold of one to confirm what it is running at.

Dan

[pwcmed]

I'm pretty sure I checked in the BIOS but I'll check when I get home.

[DMB2000uk]

It usually is set as locked, but there is a chance it might not stay locked with the high FSB. Which is why I suggested trying to find a program that will verify it for you in windows.

Dan

[martini161]

your chip can probably run at that high a frequency, the busses are probably jsut getting out of sync. look around your bios to see what kind of clock skew options are availible, and mess around with those a bit as i have found just adding a couple hundred picoseconds of clock skew can do miracles for stability

[pwcmed]

After a complete reload and messing with the bios it's finally stable in all my games. Thank god for good advice from you guys and search engines. I think all this started once I installed the physics portion of my Nvidia 512 drivers, could have been a thousand things. What ever it was it's fixed.

[pwcmed]

So its turns out that is was my audio drivers. I installed the realtek drivers and the Nvidia drivers at the same time the first time. That lead to believe it was Nvidia with there quality stuff. I started to install one thing at a time after installing the os again until, bam!! Uninstalled the realtek drivers and works like a charm. Why its effecting my games only I have now idea.

[DMB2000uk]

So are you having to game(/do everything) without sound now?

Dan

[pwcmed]

No the default vista drivers work just fine.

You know I think been spoiled over that last couple of years. This is my first issue that I have really had to troubleshoot. I've built at least 4 machines for myself and 6 for friends this with no issues this year. Hopefully this will not follow me to an upcoming 790GX, 9950 (125W) build.

[DMB2000uk]

That's all right then ^_^

Glad everything is sorted.

Dan

[pwcmed]

So I spoke to soon. I updated my video drivers to play Fry Cry 2 along with everything else that the game comes with and the problem was introduced again. I have gotten a couple errors from vista saying that the nvidia driver stopped during boot and a BSOD once during Far Cry 2 pointing to the Nvida driver. I threw in my 3470 and ran it with no problems. I'm tired of this and just getting a 4870. Maybe I can fold with 8800 GTS 512 on my other computer. It's a win win situation if you ask me. I get a new toy, you guys get a member to fold.