Overclock Failing or PSU?

[IInuyasha74]

Hello,

I am sure some of you may know me I have been on here a lot. I am wanting to get some others input on my recent issues though.

I wiped my SSD and set up a RAID 0 SSD config and installed fresh Windows 7 about a week ago. Things were going fine, but two or three days ago my PC, and nothing else, shut down completely without any BSoD, audio glitches, or other warnings while I was playing a game. At the time my CPU was close to full idle and my GPU was close to full load.

I assumed this was cause my Raidimax PSU which isn't very good and have already ordered a new one, which will be here soon.

What I am wondering though is if my other hardware might be failing now. I have had frequent freezes in State of Decay that almost seem like software glitches, though it never happened before, and it at one point caused a full BSoD. I thought it was my GPU, but I have tried it at stock settings also and it has not changed the results. I have my RAM overclocked, but I let the timings out a little without any change as well. I looked at Event Viewer and noticed I have a lot of WHEA errors listed.

So does this seem likely that my overclock has now become unstable despite running with it for about a year? Or do you think that this might just be that the PSU is having power regulation issues resulting in system instability?

Would love input on the situation.

 

[terry4536]

That sounds like a faulty power supply to me. You can test it with a different power supply. How are the voltages?

 

[terry4536]

Are there any motherboard error LEDs or beep codes?

 

[YourLocal]

My opinion is that it's simply your PSU. It's also normal to see errors in event viewer, there are rarely severe ones. i7's have a lot more headroom than a i5. Sounds like you we're playing Assasins Creed Unity at 1920x1080 @ 120 Hz with Very High Details or playing a game @ 1080p 120 Hertz with a really taxing graphics engine and your Raidmax PSU couldn't handle the full load after being in use for about a year.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

Agree that the PSU is the likley cause.... however, I think you will find that RAID 0 is simply not worth the T & E. I started my bu8od with twin 256 GB SSDs in RAID 0..... too many issues, utilities that didn't work and 0 performance benefit.

 

[IInuyasha74]

Thanks for the fast replies. I am glad to see everyone is thinking that it is likely the PSU. I currently have a RAIDMAX HYBRID 2 RX-630SS:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817152035&nm_mc=AFC-C8Junction&cm_mmc=AFC-C8Junction-_-na-_-na-_-na&cm_sp=&AID=10446076&PID=3938566&SID=

After getting some good advice the other day from other users who are more well read on PSUs than I am I ended up buying this PSU as a replacement:
http://www.ncixus.com/products/?usaffiliateid=1000031504&sku=97531&vpn=110-B2-0750-VR&manufacture=eVGA&promoid=1315

Which is a Super Flower based PSU, seems to be an excellent one. My hope is that I will plug this in and all my issues will go away.

@terry4536: All voltages are at stock with the exception of my CPU which has a +0.040v offset in use. Here are my overclocks in place to try and cover everything:
FSB: 100.5Mhz
CPU: i7-3770k : 44 multiplier = 4.422Ghz
RAM: RAM stock 1600Mhz 9-9-9-24-1T. Been using it at 1875Mhz 10-11-10-28-1T for about 6-months no issue. Raised the timings to 10-11-10-30-2T trying to nudge it into stability if it was RAM but no real change. Don't think the RAM was the issue.
GPU: Radeon 7850 stock settings = 1.21v, 920Mhz Core, 1250Mhz vRAM. Overclock = 1.21v, 1175Mhz Core, 1375Mhz vRAM

I had tested all these overclocks before with good duration tests of IntelBurnTest, Prime95, Memtest86+, Unigine Valley, and a replay of Bioshock Infinite with the settings maxed out which I only manage about 55FPS typically. Didn't have an issue then.

I haven't had any beep codes or other errors at all really. I occasionally on startup get an error that one of my CPU fans has an error, but I never see my CPU heat up past 82C even under stress test, let alone real world usage and I have two fans on the CPU so I just bypass it.

@YourLocal: Yea most of the errors seemed not worth a worry but the WHEA errors are some kind of internal CPU reported error and others have mentioned they are common a sign of CPU instability. Normally I would of just passed over them probably but with the other recent issues I felt it was worth mentioning.
Unfortunately I lack a good display like that, I just manage 1080p @60Hz. I was playing State of Decay which isn't the best optimized on the GPU side, since it was originally a Xbox 360 game and looks about Xbox 360 level of graphics. In other words looks a bit dated, but it runs my GPU 90%+ usage non stop with stock settings, which I was using at the time. CPU was idle basically. My first thought was like yours is just that it isn't a good PSU, and couldn't take the power demands and down it went.

@JackNaylorPE: Well I have been oddly fortunate so far not to have any kind of errors with the SSD setup. They aren't even a matched set. One is a Team Dark L3 240GB, and the other is an AMD R7 240GB. Newegg gives me free stuff to write reviews for them so I had bought the Team SSD before, then they gave me the AMD one. Decided to give it a go as I would love to have the extra space as my STEAM library is about 600GB in size.
I am also using NTFS File Compression on them, so I am more or less trading additional wear on the SSDs for storage size. Haven't really noticed the performance change if any, but I don't mind too much. Still has SSD performance so I am happy, and at the rate prices are dropping even if these wear out in two years I should be able to buy a 512GB for $100 by then.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

The B2 series is based upon Superflower's Golden Green Platform ... here's how they stack up (quality improves as you go down the list)

Golden Green:
EVGA Supernova 750B2/850B2
NZXT Hale90
Rosewill Capstone
Rosewill Lightning

Golden King
Rosewill Tachyon

Golden Silent
Chieftec GPS-500C
Kingwin Stryker Fanless
Rosewill SilentNight

Leadex Gold
EVGA Supernova 750G2 - 1300G2

Leadex Platinum
EVGA Supernova 1000P2 - 1300P2

I had tested all these overclocks before with good duration tests of IntelBurnTest, Prime95, Memtest86+, Unigine Valley, and a replay of Bioshock Infinite with the settings maxed out which I only manage about 55FPS typically. Didn't have an issue then.

When tuning my overclocks, I used many of those tests and others but the one test that tripped up otherwise stable OC's was RoG Real Bench.

The CPU error for the fan can be solved easily enough. The BIUOS assumes that you are using the high rpm stock Intel cooler. If your cooler's rpm ranges from say 600 to 1200.... set the minimum fan rpm for the cpu fan in the BIOS to say 575 and this will usually go way.

This issue with RAID is it just doesn't bring anything to the desktop. You the potential of catastrophic loss if one drive fails and SSD utilities like Samsung Magician don't work. Here's an ancient post on RAID from way back on THG

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID_0#RAID_0

RAID 0 is useful for setups such as large read-only NFS servers where mounting many disks is time-consuming or impossible and redundancy is irrelevant.

RAID 0 is also used in some gaming systems where performance is desired and data integrity is not very important. However, real-world tests with games have shown that RAID-0 performance gains are minimal, although some desktop applications will benefit.[1][2]

http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2101
"We were hoping to see some sort of performance increase in the game loading tests, but the RAID array didn't give us that. While the scores put the RAID-0 array slightly slower than the single drive Raptor II, you should also remember that these scores are timed by hand and thus, we're dealing within normal variations in the "benchmark".

Our Unreal Tournament 2004 test uses the full version of the game and leaves all settings on defaults. After launching the game, we select Instant Action from the menu, choose Assault mode and select the Robot Factory level. The stop watch timer is started right after the Play button is clicked, and stopped when the loading screen disappears. The test is repeated three times with the final score reported being an average of the three. In order to avoid the effects of caching, we reboot between runs. All times are reported in seconds; lower scores, obviously, being better. In Unreal Tournament, we're left with exactly no performance improvement, thanks to RAID-0

If you haven't gotten the hint by now, we'll spell it out for you: there is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer. The real world performance increases are negligible at best and the reduction in reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time between failure, makes RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop.

Bottom line: RAID-0 arrays will win you just about any benchmark, but they'll deliver virtually nothing more than that for real world desktop performance. That's just the cold hard truth."

http://www.techwarelabs.com/articles/hardware/raid-and-gaming/index_6.shtml
".....we did not see an increase in FPS through its use. Load times for levels and games was significantly reduced utilizing the Raid controller and array. As we stated we do not expect that the majority of gamers are willing to purchase greater than 4 drives and a controller for this kind of setup. While onboard Raid is an option available to many users you should be aware that using onboard Raid will mean the consumption of CPU time for this task and thus a reduction in performance that may actually lead to worse FPS. An add-on controller will always be the best option until they integrate discreet Raid controllers with their own memory into consumer level motherboards."

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1001325
"However, many have tried to justify/overlook those shortcomings by simply saying "It's faster." Anyone who does this is wrong, wasting their money, and buying into hype. Nothing more."

http://jeff-sue.suite101.com/how-raid-storage-improves-performance-a101975
"The real-world performance benefits possible in a single-user PC situation is not a given for most people, because the benefits rely on multiple independent, simultaneous requests. One person running most desktop applications may not see a big payback in performance because they are not written to do asynchronous I/O to disks. Understanding this can help avoid disappointment."

http://www.scs-myung.com/v2/index. [...] om_content
"What about performance? This, we suspect, is the primary reason why so many users doggedly pursue the RAID 0 "holy grail." This inevitably leads to dissapointment by those that notice little or no performance gain.....As stated above, first person shooters rarely benefit from RAID 0.__ Frame rates will almost certainly not improve, as they are determined by your video card and processor above all else. In fact, theoretically your FPS frame rate may decrease, since many low-cost RAID controllers (anything made by Highpoint at the tiem of this writing, and most cards from Promise) implement RAID in software, so the process of splitting and combining data across your drives is done by your CPU, which could better be utilized by your game. That said, the CPU overhead of RAID0 is minimal on high-performance processors."

Even the HD manufacturers limit RAID's advantages to very specific applications and non of them involves gaming:

http://westerndigital.com/en/products/raid/http://westerndigital.com/en/products/raid/

 

[IInuyasha74]

Well the PSU is good enough. The cost for the EVGA PSU was stretching my budget to begin with and the prices for the better ones just go up from there. May not be the best of the group, but JonnyGURU tested it out and it got a high recommendation from him, passed 80+ Silver in his tests, it has a long warranty and everything else I wanted and needed in a PSU so I think I will be alright with that one.

RoG Real Bench is a new one on me, but if it will help to know if stability continues I will definitely give it a try after the new PSU arrives. At the moment I am concerned should I push it now, the PSU might cause the system to fail and crash so I will try after the new one is installed.

Thanks for the info on the fan. I was wondering why it was doing that. Thought one of the fans might of just been dying but didn't care enough to look closer at it. It only happens occasionally. I will make sure to go adjust that on my next restart cause if I recall correctly it always did warn something about the RPM being too low.

Well thanks for all the info on the RAID 0 but I'm really not in it for the performance, at least not past standard SSD performance. I just simply wanted a larger C: Drive without needing to buy a new SSD, so when I was given this one I decided I might as well setup the RAID and see how things go. Fortunately I don't have much to worry about should the whole system fail cause of the SSD RAID 0. I have 4TB of storage on HDDs inside of the system which holds all my files I consider valuable, and I have additional 4TB of HDDs outside of the computer in a safe location which hold copies of all that data as a backup encase drive failure. Should at any point part of the storage fails (Both are 2x2TB drive groups in a non-RAID standard configuration), then I plan to immediately buy a replacement, likely a 4TB. I plan to keep the newest of the drives outside as backups and just move them inside of the computer as others fail so my storage solution ages evenly.

I also have some older drives, 1x500GB, 2x320GB, 1x 220GB, 1x200GB, 3x120GB, 4x80GB.
Should one SSD die I would just determine which and reinstall Windows, but should both die I can simply move to one of these until I have enough extra cash to purchase another SSD.

So I understand the potential risks of having this setup, and that it comes with no performance advantage, but I am well prepared to deal with a catastrophic storage failure should it come and have no interest in increased SSD performance.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

Oh I have no problem with the B2, I recommend it at least 2 -3 times day..... certainly adequate for moderate overclocking.

The think with most benchmarks is that they are small, simple and repetitive.... they do not test multitasking ability. RB tests your system with actual real and demanding programs .... including Image Editing, Encoding, Open CL and then finally all 3 at the same time while playing a movie. This series or random instruction sets tests the CPU / IMC in ways that synthetic tests simply can't.
Multitask 1.408

As for the replacement.... an SSHD will solve both problems.... SSD like performance and 4 TB capacity. It will boot windows in 16.5 seconds compared to the SSD's 15.6...... but where it really shines is in office or gaming storage. A SSHD can't touch a SSD in random access but where it really shines is in actual use.....

You have some of ya games on the SSD and rest on HD where you get b0 benefit from the SSD. But at XMas time, you download 3 new games to the SSHD. Nothing special about the 1st load you do for the game you chose to play first, but by the time you have loaded it 3 times, the algorithm recognizes that you are using these files regularly so it shifts them to the SSD portion of the drive where thay wil stay until you finish and start playing game no. 2.... and after the 3rd load or so, its files have now replaced the game your not playing anymore on the SSD portion.

In the office the same thing happens.... our biggest usage is AutoCAD and as each new job comes up, the more it is worked on the more and faster it gets shifted to the fastest part of the drive and less oft used one put back on the mechanical portion.

 

[IInuyasha74]

It sounds like it does a really good job of testing through the CPU. I will make sure to run it once I have the new PSU in place.

I know what an SSHD is like, I have one. I have a 1TB I use in my laptop, and it doesn't really do good for gaming storage. The Seagate one I have I tested on my desktop and my laptop which also has a quad-core i7. The SSHD helps with booting up and general usage, some programs but that is the end of it. They use a heuristic algorithm to determine what to copy on the SSD portion. After three times of loading the same data it typically decides to move the files to the SSD portion, but with games only small aspects that are accessed frequently might get moved giving a minor speed increase, but when the game is split into hundreds or thousands of files that are only accessed in one section of the game there is no real benefit. By the time you go to that area three times, unless you frequently load each section three times before playing which removes the point, its so far back in the record that it doesn't bother to load them. So even large commonly visited areas in game won't load faster typically. Then there are applications like Total War which is slow at loading, and massive in size, simply gets no benefit at all cause it cannot fit enough on the SSD section.

For business work SSD probably works a lot better since projects can be saved as single files or will be accessed frequently. For games though it doesn't help at all. I appreciate you are trying to help me and advise me, but the only games I keep on my HDD are typically STEAM games I moved off the SSD, in ISO format and after installation the files on the SSD are all that is accessed and gives good performance, or there are some Emulation ROMs I have which just don't really need the speed. Most of the storage is videos which also don't need it, so I am happy with the storage setup I have now.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

I have hag great success in actual testing in both instances. We have set up the two comparisons for the purpose of evaluating the technology.

Two laptops , one with SSD + HD and one with SSHD. So far no one can tell the difference. A stop watch was able to pick up a 0.9 second advantage to the SSD in boot time but users were unable to discern that.

To eliminate other hardware differences, we set up one of the desktops w/ 4.7 GHz i7 and twin GFX cards with 26% OC and with two SSDs and two SSHDs.. It was set up in part specifically to serve as a test bed for out own builds as well as to serve as a information source for other users we build for. .... It was set up to boot an run games / programs off either; loading times for games (after 5 loads) were measured and were identical to the tenth of a second.

 

[IInuyasha74]

So wanted to report back, will probably make a new post about this cause its a perfect example while a good PSU is important.

I got the EVGA Supernova 750 B2 and it is amazing the difference that it has made! I was getting constant glitches before trying to play games, several errors related to the CPU, and everyone was right its because of the power regulation. I did an IntelBurnTest, the score wasn't different really, but the power consumption dropped from about 1.24v on the monitor before, down to about 1.18v now. Heat has dropped by over 10C. On the GPU side, heat is just down a few degrees, maybe 3C, but is running perfectly stable and I am quite positive that I can now push the hardware further and get a better overclock without even needing to play with voltage cause everything is running so much smoother. Oh and as an added bonus, my PC is very silent now. Very happy with the results, last time I buy a PSU without doing the research first.

 

[terry4536]

I know hat you mean. I purchased a Seasonic Platinum 860 watt a few years back. To this date I haven't had any indication that is is even on (sound wise). I always recommend a quality power supply. Because it is relatively cheap insurance for the rest of the system