Really getting sick of this...

[CaptNKILL]

What is with this double\triple booting crap with Socket 775 boards when overclocking?

I'm in the process of building a gaming system for someone and I bought a nice cooler so I could overclock the E6750 to around 3Ghz but the freaking board won't accept any overclock settings.

It shuts itself off and then reboots and resets everything.

The only progress I made was moving my hard drive and CDROM SATA cables from Sata 0 and Sata 1 to Sata 0 and Sata 2 (making them show up as master 1 and slave 2 in the bios, rather than master 1 and master 2). This at least allowed me to manually set the FSB to the default speed. Before that I couldn't touch anything related to the memory ratio or the FSB, no matter what settings I used. Setting the FSB to "Auto" worked, which set it to 333Mhz. Manually setting it to 333Mhz would cause a double reboot and would reset it back to auto.

After moving the sata plugs I can at least change it but I can't get more than 15-20Mhz out of the FSB before it does the double reboot again.

The board is cheap but it should handle 375Mhz FSB no problem (up from 333). Its a Gigabyte G41M-ES2L and the north bridge heatsink doesn't show any signs of overheating.
The rest of the specs...
XFX Radeon 4870 1Gb
2x2Gb OCZ PC2-6400
Corsair 400W (30A 12v rail... its plenty)
WD Blue 500Gb
Samsung SATA DVDRW

I'm having a similar issue on my main system as well. I simply cannot get my system to boot with anything higher than my current overclock. It will just do a double reboot and reset the overclock.

Does anyone have any ideas? I'm really getting pretty pissed off that these things have such obscure problems. I've had this CPU at 3.6Ghz with 450Mhz FSB running on my Gigabyte P35. It runs perfectly fine with all settings set to "auto". I updated the BIOS, I've tried one stick of RAM, I've removed the 4870 (just used onboard), I've unplugged the SATA drives, I've disabled just about everything in the bios that can be disabled (including all onboard devices, all drive controllers, ports, all thermal management settings, multithreading, SMART, usb device support, all USB controllers)... I even unplugged the keyboard immediately after saving the bios settings so that there was literally nothing plugged into the computer other than the monitor. There is no reason that this thing should fail to post (it reboots while the screen is still black before the bios screen shows up) with the FSB set to reasonable level, the CPU underclocked by 300Mhz and the memory underclocked by 50Mhz.

I don't know if this is a gigabyte issue or a Socket 775 issue but I'm really getting sick of this double and triple rebooting crap. I remember having some frustrating memory related problems with my DFI Nforce 4 Ultra board when I was running an Athlon X2 4200+ but I've never seen anything like this where things simply do not work and the solutions are often obscure and don't seem related to anything. For example, moving the SATA plugs allowed me to change my FSB, and for some people disabling USB mouse support in the bios had the same effect. :headexplode:

[Bman212121]

The board is cheap but it should handle 375Mhz FSB no problem (up from 333). Its a Gigabyte G41M-ES2L and the north bridge heatsink doesn't show any signs of overheating.
The rest of the specs...
XFX Radeon 4870 1Gb
2x2Gb OCZ PC2-6400
Corsair 400W (30A 12v rail... its plenty)
WD Blue 500Gb
Samsung SATA DVDRW


You're making a big assumption there CaptNKILL. At 375 that's already a 1500 FSB. I cannot run that on my 780i. Anything over 1490mhz and it won't post correctly. There are some huge holes in there and you can get it to post and boot at like 1600, but it won't run stable. I think you're just expecting too much out of your components.

If the computer reboots a 2nd time it means that the overclock settings did not work and it was reverting back to stock settings. So whatever you're setting it obviously doesn't feel it can boot with it like that. One more thing to consider is vdroop. Your P35 might have a much lower vdroop so you can get away with lower voltages and get it to boot. A cheaper board is going have a larger drop requiring more voltage for the same settings.

Check out the CPU support list. They show it will run with a QX9770, but it will only run them with a 1333 fsb. So they must know their boards won't do 1600 fsb if they won't run it for that processor. http://www.gigabyte.us/Support/Motherboard/CPUSupport_Model.aspx?ProductID=3022

[CaptNKILL]

You're making a big assumption there CaptNKILL. At 375 that's already a 1500 FSB. I cannot run that on my 780i. Anything over 1490mhz and it won't post correctly. There are some huge holes in there and you can get it to post and boot at like 1600, but it won't run stable. I think you're just expecting too much out of your components.

I don't know. It seems a bit ridiculous that a brand new $65 board can't hit 350Mhz FSB when my 2 year old $80 motherboard could hit 450Mhz with the same exact CPU.

Also, with my Quad (on my P35 board), I can't get anywhere near 450Mhz, no matter what I set the multiplier to... even though it worked with my E6750 at 450Mhz for 2 years.

This is the kind of thing that drives me nuts.

[CaptNKILL]

****

http://forums.overclockers.com.au/showthread.php?t=801089&page=3

I got one of these boards to pair up with an e7200. Unfortunately it seems to have a hard fsb wall at exactly 344mhz.

343 posts and memtest/primes ok, but 344 causes it to revert back to stock, and setting 344 or higher in setFSB causes the whole thing to lock up
(but setting to lower fsb works of course)

Later on i might try the BSEL mod on the cpu, and change a few bios options around, but this puzzles me a lot.


Edit: After some research, it seems that this is a hard chipset limitation. Nobody has been able to get more than 345mhz from a G41.. that's also why they dropped the "1600fsb supported" stickers on the box.

God dammit.

Now I'm stuck with this POS. I really wanted to give this kid a nicely overclocked system and now he's getting a 2.67Ghz dual core. :\

That's what I get for being loyal to a brand. I read about several other cheap ass boards overclocking just fine but I buy the name brand one that can't do anything.

[Bman212121]

I don't know. It seems a bit ridiculous that a brand new $65 board can't hit 350Mhz FSB when my 2 year old $80 motherboard could hit 450Mhz with the same exact CPU.

Also, with my Quad, I can't get anywhere near 450Mhz, no matter what I set the multiplier to... even though it worked with my E6750 at 450Mhz for 2 years.

This is the kind of thing that drives me nuts.

You just need to take a step back and realize what you're saying. The $65 board was probably designed to run 1066 fsb processors, and they were able to squeeze some extra headroom on it to get it to run at 1333mhz. That is already a 25% overclock over the stock settings. We take for granted now that you can just grab and CPU and any board and just pull 50% increases out of thin air. Go back a few years just before the C2Ds came out and you might be ecstatic getting a 10% increase over stock settings.

The first thing to remember with overclocking is there are no guarantees. If you can get 1 mhz over stock settings that's better than nothing.

[CaptNKILL]

You just need to take a step back and realize what you're saying. The $65 board was probably designed to run 1066 fsb processors, and they were able to squeeze some extra headroom on it to get it to run at 1333mhz. That is already a 25% overclock over the stock settings. We take for granted now that you can just grab and CPU and any board and just pull 50% increases out of thin air. Go back a few years just before the C2Ds came out and you might be ecstatic getting a 10% increase over stock settings.

The first thing to remember with overclocking is there are no guarantees. If you can get 1 mhz over stock settings that's better than nothing.

I've read several people getting over 400Mhz FSB on other G41 boards.

Read my post above. There's just some kind of wall on these things that stops them from getting over 343Mhz. I know, there are no guarantees in overclocking, but that doesn't make me any less pissed that this particular board is so far behind all others that I've used over the past 3 years. You're right that years ago on other platforms it was unheard of to get FSBs in the high 400s. But we're talking about a recent chipset on a board that's only been out a few months, on a platform that is well known for having huge overclocks, especially on Intel chipsets.

I'm not sure what to do at this point. I don't know if I'll be able to live with myself knowing I built a gaming system with a kick ass video card, a nice cooler, 4Gb of ram and a 2.67Ghz dual core. :(

I know its not THAT slow since it has 4Mb of cache, but I was really hoping to build a stronger system than this.

[Bman212121]

I've read several people getting over 400Mhz FSB on other G41 boards.

Read my post above. There's just some kind of wall on these things that stops them from getting over 343Mhz. I know, there are no guarantees in overclocking, but that doesn't make me any less pissed that this particular board is so far behind all others that I've used over the past 3 years. You're right that years ago on other platforms it was unheard of to get FSBs in the high 400s. But we're talking about a recent chipset on a board that's only been out a few months, on a platform that is well known for having huge overclocks, especially on Intel chipsets.

I'm not sure what to do at this point. I don't know if I'll be able to live with myself knowing I built a gaming system with a kick ass video card, a nice cooler, 4Gb of ram and a 2.67Ghz dual core. :(

You can RMA the board. :lol: Actually re-reading what you said you meant on other non gigabyte G41 boards. So RMA'ing this model won't do you any good. :(

EDIT: I can understand your disappointment, but at least having a stable system running at stock speeds is better than having a flaky system that is overclocked. I don't usually OC anything that I'm going to give to someone just because if they have issues they wouldn't know how to take it back to stock, or mess with the overclock to figure out what's going on.

I don't think you're going to be noticing a huge difference in games anyway unless you have a pretty good video card. At 3.0ghz I haven't noticed anything that has been so limited by the cpu that it hampers my performance. It might have been nice to make the system a little quicker, but it's probably still light years ahead of what they had.

[CaptNKILL]

Yeah, and exchanging it for a different board is pretty much out of the question. ZZF has a 15% restocking fee, so after sending it back and buying another board I'd probably be out $50. That's a decent chunk of my profit.

After looking at some benchmarks to make me feel better I think I'm just going to leave it. He'll have a stable, solid system that will take a quad core if he ever wants to beef it up a bit. He almost bought an $850 system at wal-mart with a 1.8Ghz Phenom x4, 7Gb of ram and integrated HD3200 graphics at wal-mart so regardless of the relatively low clockspeed of the CPU he's getting an amazing deal on this system for around a grand. Heck I even made sure to get a Dell 22" 1080P screen so he'd have a 3 year warranty and I preordered Windows 7 for him. :o

EDIT: This system has a 4870 1Gb and is intended for gaming... that's the main reason I was so miffed about the lack of overclocking.

[Bman212121]

Yeah, and exchanging it for a different board is pretty much out of the question. ZZF has a 15% restocking fee, so after sending it back and buying another board I'd probably be out $50. That's a decent chunk of my profit.

After looking at some benchmarks to make me feel better I think I'm just going to leave it. He'll have a stable, solid system that will take a quad core if he ever wants to beef it up a bit. He almost bought an $850 system at wal-mart with a 1.8Ghz Phenom x4, 7Gb of ram and integrated HD3200 graphics at wal-mart so regardless of the relatively low clockspeed of the CPU he's getting an amazing deal on this system for around a grand. Heck I even made sure to get a Dell 22" 1080P screen so he'd have a 3 year warranty and I preordered Windows 7 for him. :o

EDIT: This system has a 4870 1Gb and is intended for gaming... that's the main reason I was so miffed about the lack of overclocking.

Other than WiC and FC2 everything else my 8800GTX SLI usually runs out of power before my quad does. Those cards together should be faster than that 4870.

[CaptNKILL]

Other than WiC and FC2 everything else my 8800GTX SLI usually runs out of power before my quad does. Those cards together should be faster than that 4870.

Yeah I think it'll be fine.

Heck this "old" CPU is still competitive with the Phenom II X2 550 which is 3.1Ghz...

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/default.aspx?p=97&p2=60

[nekrosoft13]

2.66GHz vs 3.1GHz, Intel really build those chips well

[CaptNKILL]

2.66GHz vs 3.1GHz, Intel really build those chips well

Yeah and the E6750 is pretty old too. I bought it with my P35 board back in July of 2007.

[mullet]

He is gonna get a good deal dude either way.

[CaptNKILL]

Problem is being solved.

Both my overclocking problem and his. ;)

I bought a Gigabyte EP45-UD3P for my system and I'm going to put my P35-DS3R in his system. Its a much better board, and I'll be a lot happier knowing he's got a decent board that isn't bottom of the barrel crap. Oh, and now I have an excellent mobo with a second PCI-E slot so I can finally use my 9600GT for Physx! :D

I used Amazon prime and got the board here in 2 days for only $4. :D

And I also have Windows 7 Pro x64, so I'll be doing a totally unexpected system upgrade tonight... followed by some more overclocking. :lol:

[crainger]

Nice work Joe.

[betterdan]

So how high have you got that 9550 overclocked Captn? I really believe mine would go higher than 3.8 stable with a different motherboard. Mine doesn't like the ram dividers being changed other than where I have it set now I don't think. If I lower or raise the ram speed from where I have it set now it crashes windows. Ah well 3.8 is fine for me.

Also how are your temps?

[CaptNKILL]

So how high have you got that 9550 overclocked Captn? I really believe mine would go higher than 3.8 stable with a different motherboard. Mine doesn't like the ram dividers being changed other than where I have it set now I don't think. If I lower or raise the ram speed from where I have it set now it crashes windows. Ah well 3.8 is fine for me.

Also how are your temps?

Well it turns out one of my sticks of memory was bad so I'm kind of stuck for now.

I just threw in some GSkill DDR2-800 that I had laying around and I pushed the CPU up to 3.4 with absolutely no problems. I'm not going to mess with it until I get that ram replaced though. I've always been a little suspicious that I had a memory problem but I narrowed it down to just one of the four sticks today using memtest.

Honestly, I wish the price of memory didn't go through the roof (comparatively) recently. I'd like to get a 2x2Gb set of 1066. I think using 4x1 has always been problematic for overclocking for some reason.

EDIT: woot... got the E6750 in the other system to 3.2Ghz easy on an OCZ Vendetta cooler. It runs pretty hot (58C) in OCCT so I think I'll back it down to 3Ghz and drop the voltage a bit. I think that'll add a bit more oomph to the CPU over the 2.66Ghz stock clocks. :)

[betterdan]

Cool, keep us informed on your overclocking adventures.

[CaptNKILL]

Cool, keep us informed on your overclocking adventures.

Will do.

I really want to do 4Ghz at a reasonable temperature with this Q9550.

[CaptNKILL]

Just to make sure that none of my other Wintec AMPX memory was bad, I threw the 3 good sticks in last night and ran memtest on it for nearly 6 hours with no errors. That was at 2.2v (for the ram). I read around a bit online and there seems to be some inconsistency with the voltage this memory should run at. Some places say it should run at 1066 at 1.9v, while others list it as 2.2v for that speed (including the PDF spec sheet at Wintec). So a little while ago I dropped the voltage back down to 1.9v and memtested it for about 15 minutes with no errors. I'm still not 100% sure if that's correct but it seems stable enough. The heat spreaders always seemed quite hot at 2.2v. I'm honestly surprised that I only have one bad stick after running it like that for so long.

So I messed with the fsb a little and booted it at 800Mhz 1:1 for a 3.4Ghz CPU clock... and it worked the first time. With that bad stick of memory in there it was a nightmare trying to get my previous system to boot after changing FSB settings.

So... of course, I had to crank it up to 450Mhz FSB. :p

So now I'm running at 3.83Ghz at 1.3v with the ram at 900Mhz (for now) and its running OCCT without a hiccup. The temps are a bit warm (59,55,55,54 on the cores) but not bad at all. The memory timings have been at 5-5-5-15 the whole time.

It sucks that I probably have to send one of my good sticks in to RMA the bad kit. I think I could probably hit 4Ghz easy with this setup today.

[betterdan]

Are those mid to high 50 temps while running OCCT? If so that is pretty damn good.

I hope it isn't while idling.

I get a high of 60C after running Prime 95 for a few hours and OCCT hits 71C after an hour.

[CaptNKILL]

Are those mid to high 50 temps while running OCCT? If so that is pretty damn good.

I hope it isn't while idling.

I get a high of 60C after running Prime 95 for a few hours and OCCT hits 71C after an hour.

Yeah that was under load. :)

That wasn't the linpack test though. It was the large file OCCT test.

I ran it for an hour and 25 minutes and actually forgot is was going while I posted here. :lol:

My temps topped out at 61,59,58,58.

The temps are great but I just can't believe its actually stable. I don't have Load Line Calibration turned on, so it still reads around 1.26v (set to 1.3v in bios) idle and 1.23v under load. At this same setting on my other board my startup programs would be crashing before they all loaded successfully. I'm not sure if it due to the board having more stable voltages or that bad stick of memory being removed. It was probably the memory, but it just seems strange because the memory worked fine at 848Mhz... not a single error.

I'm pretty psyched about the stability and temps though. I don't even have a real good fan on my CPU (just a cheapo antec tri-cool set to high) but my rear exhaust fan is so close to the heatsink it must be acting like a push-pull setup.

EDIT: LOL... yeah its stable...

I was just working on something off the computer for a while with a CD playing on the computer. The CD skipped a few times and I couldn't figure out why. I just sat back down and looked something up online and I realized I'd had the OCCT small data set test running for the past hour and a half. :rofl

I totally forgot that I started that test. My temps are great though. 61,58,56,56. :)

[betterdan]

Wow that's great Capt. Why don't you have your TRUE heatsink on the CPU? Do you need an adapter? Oh and don't forget to change your sig to reflect your overclock. ;)

[CaptNKILL]

Wow that's great Capt. Why don't you have your TRUE heatsink on the CPU? Do you need an adapter? Oh and don't forget to change your sig to reflect your overclock. ;)

I do have it on there. But I got mine before they came with a fan.

Actually, Mullet sent it to me for free. He's a good guy. :D

EDIT: Almost forgot, this thing is running at 450Mhz FSB with no FSB or MCH voltage increase. All I did was crank the FSB, set the memory voltage to 1.9v, set the memory to 1:1, set the PCI-E speed to 100 (to make sure it doesn't change), set the CPU voltage to 1.3v and disable any thermal throttling options.

[betterdan]

Yep same things I did on my board except I enabled Load Line Calibration because I was too scared to increase the voltage that high.
My board does not like me messing with MCH or FSB voltages at all.