Opteron overclocking grief

[jimmymac]

help a friend?

and no i aint just gonna pass it off as my suggestions if we come up with a solution, i always refer back to here and suggest they join themselves

Here is a magnificent copy and paste of an email I just sent to someone, which I then decided might benefit from a wider audience, 'cause I'm perplexed.

Basically, I'm running a heavily overclocked Opteron 146 (S939) in my PC, or rather, I was, 'cause it won't do it anymore.

Stock speed on these is 2.0GHz, I did have mine at 2.8GHz 100% stable - the email explains the rest.....

Anyone got any ideas?

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Dunno, it used to run 100% at 2.8GHz, nearly got it stable at 2.9GHz but Prime95 would error after 30 minutes or so.

Then, a couple of months ago now, it would hang on the POST screen, reset, hang on POST again, reset, boot fine at 2.8GHz. Sometimes it would boot first time at 2.8GHz, sometimes two resets, sometimes five, but it would always boot, and once it was in Windows it was absolutely 100% stable 24 hours a day whatever I did with it.

Then one day it just wouldn't boot at 2.8GHz at all, no matter how many resets or how long I left it turned off for (so we're not talking about overheating here, this is a PC that's hanging at POST after being off all night), so I dropped it down to 2.6GHz and that seemed fine, but then it started behaving just as it had at 2.8GHz, until eventually it totally refused to boot. (All the time the behaviour was exactly the same, it would hang at POST only, once it was in Windows I could thrash it constantly, leave it on for days at a time and it was 100% stable, it was ONLY at a reboot or a cold boot that it might hang at POST.)

So I dropped it down to 2.4GHz and that seemed to have cracked it, it booted and ran fine for a couple of weeks, until it started needing multiple resets to get it past POST, and then it refused to boot at 2.4GHz completely.

Had to drop it down to 2.25GHz but it only lasted a week at that.

Now I'm down to the stock speed of 2.0GHz and touch wood it's running fine, but I do wonder if it'll give up the ghost there at some point. I'm not even 100% convinced it's the CPU, I'm thinking dodgy motherboard perhaps.

All the overclocking was done "by the book," made sure I kept the RAM within its limits, always did stability tests with Prime95 etc, it's not overheating 'cause Core Temp shows it maxing out at 43C even after thrashing at Prime95 for a couple of hours, and of course the ambient temperature is high at the moment so it's being cooled fine.

But even then, a PC doesn't overheat within 5 seconds of being turned on, which it would have to be to be hanging at POST.

I'm totally mystified TBH, and I'm not sure a replacement CPU will cure it, but it's worth a bash.

edited out any of the poor languange, apologies if i missed anything, please edit mods if you spot anything untoward

 

[hermeslyre]

Sounds like a certain component has failed, and my guess is the motherboard. The fact that when you could boot into Windows the system was completely stable leads me to believe the chip isn't the problem, it could be your RAM refusing to cooperate also.. It wouldn't be possible to test this by sticking it in a spare motherboard, or something similar to this, would it?

 

[jimmymac]

dont think so, out of curioisty i thought i would ask about the V core situation to which he replied...

Completely stable and the correct amount, as reported both in the BIOS and using Gigabyte's own EasyTune software, (and Core Temp as well), it automatically gives it a little more juice when under 100% load, and drops down when idle again, which is the way it's always behaved.

I should also add the memory is not, and never has been, overclocked - I've always kept it under 400MHz by using a memory divider in the BIOS.

 

[jimmymac]

any other help on this one at all folks, seems it might be the mobo or the memory at the moment but wondered if anyone else had experienced something similar and knew what the issue was?