Just for the record. My first time I tried to overclock something went wrong. Im under the impression it was something called "speed step" which I havn't quite figured out yet.
My first attempt
On my first attempt to overclock I had a successfull overclock to 2.6ghz and then tried to go higher. I adjusted the cpu clock and the cpu clock ratio 9 X 333 and the pc crashed. Everytime I tried to relaunch the computer would never go past the logo show. This was pretty scary. So I got some help from one of my clan mates.
Resetting the bios
My friend directed me to reset the bios. First shut down, switched the power off and disconnected the powersupply. Then i popped the little round battery out and pushed it back in. Then above the pci slot on the top there are 3pins with a jumper on it. the jumper is over the bottom 2 pins. I moved the jumper from the bottom 2 pins to the top 2 pins for 3-5 seconds. Then I moved the jumper back to bottom 2 pins. Reconnected the powersupply turned it on and tried to fire it up again.
When windows tried to launch I got this blue screen of death that told me that there was something wrong with my hard drives. Now I was really scared. We put 2 and 2 together and remembered that I am running a RAID configuration and that I needed to set the raid back up in the bios.
Setting up the raid in bios
I again reset the bios and launched the computer again this time I went straight into the bios. under the integrated peripherals/onchip IDE Device I had to change to SATA and the mode to raid. Saved and restarted and it entered windows again... PHEW!!!
what is "speed step"?
Im still not sure what it does, but I noticed in my cup-z the voltage would constantly be bobbing around. In my readings and my friend also suggested that I should shut this off. I read it needed to be shut off in windows and also in the bios settings.
Off in windows-right click desktop and go to properties, go to screensaver, then click power. Turn the power scheme to always on. click apply.
Off in the bios-Well, we disabled a bunch of settings in the Genie Bios settings/Cpu Feature section. Everything I list here I disabled based on the suggestions of my friend. Thermal management control, PPM(EIST) Mode, Limit CPUID Max val, C1E Function, Execute Disable Bit, Virtualization Technology. We left Core Multi-processing Enabled.
Then I saved and restarted windows again. This time when I started cpu-z I noticed that the voltage didn't fluctuate at all. I believe it was this "speed step" that was what was causing my problem. Does anyone have any insight to this?
Overclocking
I went back into the bios changed the CPU clock ratio to 9X changed the CPU clock to 333. I also changed the DRAM speed to 333/800 Im running ddr2(800) ram. Saved and restarted and it entered windows no problem. I checked the cpu-z and everything it was running 3.0GHz so then I wanted to see how stable it was. and how hot it got.
Temp testing
at idle my temps were good 27C-28C. I did a 3Dmark06 test to see if the computer could handle that. No crashes and my temps never went over 43C Then I jumped in game and temps never went over 43C. I went to bed and ran prime95. It ran for 4 and a half hours and these were my results.
i know I should run it longer but im confident that my computer is quite stable at 3.0ghz, my temps never went over 45C, and my voltage remained constant at 1.296.
So how much more do you think I can get on air without increasing voltages?
))
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