Bizaar problem with Q6600 O/C

[anton]

Hi guys, I'm going ... and about to pull my hair out.

My rig is as follows:

Q6600 stepping G0 with Exos Al Watercooling
4GB Ram
8800GT
Vista 64
Gigabyte P35C mobo

I have been running it for the last few months at 3.3-3.5ghz no probs, with moderately increased voltages.

A day or two ago I noticed that my games were choppier than usual and my CPU temps were low (In particular FSX which is heavily CPU intensive), and checked my CPU speed only to find that it was at standard (2.4ghz). So I went into the bios to see if somehow they had been reset, only to find that the bios was still reporting my O/C as I had it, at 3.3ghz. So, I restarted, and in the POST screen as well as in Windows, it showed my CPU clock at 2.4ghz.

I then put all settings on standard, restarted, shut down, went into my bios, changed to a less extreme overclock (3ghz) and tried again... with the same result of POST and windows reporting 2.4ghz.

I then tried a very small overclock (2.5ghz) and it still reported 2.4ghz. Tried fiddling with voltages etc, but nothing seems to be changing the CPU speed. My voltages are changing to my bios settings by the way. I have now tried all sorts of combinations of FSB and multiplier settings with no results.

In the last few days there have been a few Windows updates, but other than that I can't think of anything which I may have done to create this problem.

Is the MB protecting itself somehow and not allowing anything off the standard clocks? Or is the BIOS corrupted and needs to be flashed again? Do I need to remove and replace the CMOS battery?

If any of you guys have ever had this experience, please let me know!

Many thanks
Anton.

 

[CompuTronix]

I think you're correct about corrupt or buggy BIOS. Re-flash and see if that corrects the problem. If the flash is an update to a newer version, your CPU temperature (not Core temperatures) may change. You might also try flashing to a previous version.

Comp

 

[Andrius]

This happend to me a few months ago.
It was perfectly fine at 3.0GHz and 1.24375V for let's say 2 months.
One day a program crashes (I think it was diskepper which seemed to do that every time I plugged in my 2.5 usb disk). After that for three days the FSB didn't change no matter what I tried.
So I took the box of the power grid and moved it home (over new years hollidays). When I arrived home it booted up at the preset 3.0GHz and worked flawlessly ever since.

Try unplugging it from the socket for 15 minutes. Maybe it will go away 😉.
EDIT to fix some spelling.

 

[Lupiron]

LOL, yeah, totally power down the board for a little while, with zero power. That can actually help with all sorts of things. I believe that a component may hold a "charge" which keeps it from ever re setting on a boot, because power may still be going through a component. I dont know why it happens, but it sure does!

As far as your OC going away, thats possible. Maybe it has a CPR function that recovers when it thinks an OC went bad. Mine likes to do it every once in a while depending on how I re start. It will act like it wants to re start, power down again, then boot with stock settings. I just have to jump into the bios when it does that and do nothing but click save, since my old OC parameters are still there.

--Lupi

 

[anton]

Well Andrius, that has prooved to be exactly the problem. We happened to have a power cut for 2 hours, and when it came back on, it booted at 3.6ghz, which it is at now. Very weird indeed, and a little unsettling when your hardware won't listen to you, but chuffed it's working 'normally' again.

Thanks for the replies guys.