[?] "Overclocking failed!" & Intel's ETU

[scotthew]

I've had my mobo+cpu set up for two years now, and I invested in some upgrades during the holiday sales (GPU, SSDs, DIMMs). Well I figured it was about time I overclocked this puppy and see what she can do (conservatively though). I used Hiker's i7 Overclocking Guide on the ASUS forums as a reference. My goal was to get between 3.4-3.6GHz out of my i7 940 and ~2000MHz on the DRAM. All said and done, I save+exit BIOS, the PC powers off then on, doesn't display video, I manual power off+on, and I get a nasty "Overclocking failed!" error. I messed with settings a half dozen times and kept getting the error before reverting to defaults.

I read that using BIOS was the preferred method of overclocking, but since that hasn't worked yet, I tried this nifty Intel Extreme Tuning Utility. Has anyone used it? Thoughts/Opinions? It seemed to do what it's meant to. I set to 21x150MHz BCLK, 1800MHz DRAM, 1.225v CPU, & 1.64v DRAM. Gonna run its stress test in loop tonight and see how it holds up. Currently ASUS AI Suite is clocking it at 3.5GHz and 39°C.

Here's my info if you have any thoughts on why my BIOS failed at overclocking:

ASUS P6X58D Premium
Intel Core i7-940 @ 2.93GHz
Patriot Viper II Sector 7 Ed. SDRAM DDR-2000
GIGABYTE Radeon HD 6970 2.0
OCZ Vertex 3 120GBx2 in RAID 0
Corsair TX750W
Prolimatech Megahalems Rev.B
Scythe S-Flex SFF21G 120mm

Initial OC settings in BIOS:

AI Overlcock Tuner . . . . . . . . . Manual
CPU Ratio Setting. . . . . . . . . . 21.0
Intel SpeedStep Tech . . . . . . . . Disabled
Xtreme Phase Full Power. . . . . . . Enabled
BCLK Frequency . . . . . . . . . . . 167
PCIe Frequency . . . . . . . . . . . 100
DRAM Frequency . . . . . . . . . . . 2004(ish)
UCLK Frequency . . . . . . . . . . . 4008(ish)
QPI Link Data Rate . . . . . . . . . Auto

CPU Voltage Control. . . . . . . . . Manual
CPU Voltage. . . . . . . . . . . . . Auto
CPU PLL Voltage. . . . . . . . . . . 1.80
QPI/DRAM Core Voltage. . . . . . . . Auto
DRAM Bus Voltage . . . . . . . . . . 1.64
*All Other Voltages to Auto

Thanks in advance guys!

 

[inzone]

I used to get the overclocking fail as well untill I read in a forum some place that the way to do it is increase the multiplier up untill Windows is not stable then add a small amount of voltage untill it stabilizes and then continue with the multiplier again , leaving the bclk alone. It does seem to work out better and when you raise the bclk then the memory frequency goes up at the same time so I think thats where the OC tends to fail. But I'm no expert so I may be doing it wrong , but it does work for me.
Just by looking at your bios settings I see that the bclk is at 167 and I think that is why it failed. Since you have an Asus board did you have any other choices in the Cpu Level Up or AI Overclock Tuner. I don't think you needed the Extreme Phase Full Power enabled , that's only if you are going over the recomended voltages.

 

[scotthew]

Just by looking at your bios settings I see that the bclk is at 167 and I think that is why it failed. Since you have an Asus board did you have any other choices in the Cpu Level Up or AI Overclock Tuner.

Well the multiplier is capped at 22 for my 940. To be honest I don't truly understand the multiplier, I was just following the guide I linked which says to adjust the BCLK Freq. For example, what's the difference between 22.0x150 and 11.0x300? Do you want a higher multiplier and lower BCLK for some reason?


On another note I ran the Intel ETU stress test all night and nothing failed. The CPU peaked at 59°C. I'll try a different stress test tonight, but it looks like I could easily squeeze some more out of it. If the Intel ETU overclock seems to be working is there any benefit to figuring out my BIOS issue?