Overclocking Dodgy scan overclock or different hardware problem?

I'd complain like hell! The bloke on the end of the phone clearly has either no experience or doesn't give a rats. Either way is a bad result for your predicament.

What a bunch of cowboys! Disappointing to hear of a well regarded retailer with great rep in the community failing so hard at something which should be their bread and butter.

 

I agree with scott. Best thing is to contact the Scan guys here at Bit-tech.

 

well scan replied:

Further to our conversation,

I have copied and pasted the email below from system build


The best thing to suggest to him would be to reseat the CPU with new thermal compound and change the OC to 4.6 and CPU Vcore set to 1.42v. If the problem still persists I would need to look at the bundle here.

I hope this email helps, If you have anymore issues feel free to contact us again

Scan Return




I'll give it a try and move forward from there.

 

I am so close to copy pasting some of this into the scan forum.

I can't believe the guy suggested running at 90 - 95c is okay!! I have hit 83c at 5Ghz @1.45 and was shitting it, unbelievable.

 

I'll give their settings a try, for the sake of following the process even if I don't agree with it all

 

what is 'the process'? RMA after your CPU dies?

 

I'm with Scott, just cut your loses and start from scratch. I was shocked at how easy this platform is to overclock, and that just goes to show how remarkably thick the people Scan are employing are. I think they're one of the most reliable retailers in the country, but that's where it ends apparently...

Mistakes happen, I can imagine doing these things day in day out kind of takes the fun out of it (don't agree with pre-overclocked packages anyway) But for someone to then suggest on the phone that 95C is safe on these chips is a joke, tool should be sacked

 

Just cut Scan out of the loop, follow advice on here, and do it yourself. SB is fairly easy to OC. There's some good conversations going on in the Geekbench thread regarding various OC topics, and Bit has done a "How to Overclock the i5" article.

 

This is a well used article!

BTW - someone mentioned CPU PLL at 1.9V above - you don't need to adjust the PLL on SB much at all. In fact it can make it worse on some boards, or even kill your CPU that much quicker. Take it with a pinch of salt.

 

That was me, I don't know why I had that number in my head, its 1.8

 

Copy and paste from the article.

CPU PLL Voltage: Generally this doesn't need changing at all, although if increasing the CPU Voltage or the two Vcc options doesn't work, it's worth a try. Using anything over 2V isn't recommended, but 1.9V can help to stabilise an overclock.


Article written by Richard Swinburne. Bindi are you telling us to take whatever you say with a pinch of salt?

I've had CPU PLL set to 1.9V since I bought my SB rig and used this guide to OC it. Been completely stable ever since. I'll try dropping it down a bit and see how it goes tonight.

 

That's where I got it from!

I'm certain I've had it at 1.9 for 5ghz bench runs then dropped back to 1.8 and never had an issue (tho re reading the article it suggests running at 1.81 so I might try that)

Bindi make me feel like I has killing my cpu

 

Asus recommends raising the PLL voltage on Sandybridge slightly for high overclocks (i.e. over 4.7GHz), but not above 1.85v unless you have extremely good cooling.

 

Finally had some time to test the suggested settings from scan, after replacing the GPU and PSU's to try and eliminate my other components from the mix.

Unsurprisingly their suggestion of changing the OC down to 4.6 and setting the Vcore to 1.42 didn't solve the issue. I also have not yet tried the thermal compound change that scan previously suggest to help part address the issue with the temperature but that's due to lack of my own compound to replace it with, rather than a lack of willing.

I'm going to contact Chris P on this forum as suggested and see if he can flex some good customer service muscles on my behalf that don't involve me being without my machine for another 2 weeks.

Thanks,

 

drop the overclock to 4ghz and a 1.3vcore and work upwards

use 40multi with turbo disabled for testing purposes

then reenable turbo and retest

if its stable work from there, By work from there i mean work the vcore downwords till you find the stable min vcore required for 4ghz. After that you can start increasing the overclock step by step. Sandybridge may of made overclocking easy but banging in 1.45vcore and 4.7ghz default like scan has done is not always guarenteed to work.

1.42 vcore is still crazy if your not under water, 95c is above intels own recomended max of 90c lol

every cpu is dif main issue here is your cpu requires very high voltage to go 4.7ghz probably looking at 1.5vcore which is just a luck of the draw thing. Scan probably have sold 100 bundles at this settings and had no issues at all.

Its why serius overclockers look for binned cpus or certain batches that are known to overclock higher i dout scan are doing this, Id guess they are just ripping open the oem boxes and banging them in with little to no testing involved in the process.

From my own personal experiences

A stable overclock is prime95 stable for 24hrs whilst running furmark in the background to stress the entire system. Failure in either program means the cpu overclock has failed major companies and most test websites dont really test overclocks correctly anymore. 4-6hr burn tests here and there with no graphics hardware been pushed.

Most motherboards wont really hit there limits just stressing 1 component, Start stressing all of it and you will quickly find the level of overclock your board can take. Theres a reason theres a huge market for binned cpus and mobos.

 

Hi DeckerdBR

Our System support dept have screenshots of the Bundle passing here at 77 degrees. When the system was returned it was cleaned with an Air Compressor, if you can confirm the system is still in it's original condition as it may need cleaning internally.

Please PM me your Invoice Number so we can re-look into this for you.

Best Regards

 

It sounds like you may have a CPU that just doesn't overclock well. Normally you'd have to put up with this, but if you've bought a bundle advertised as tested and running at 4.6GHz, it has to do that. What you really shouldn't be doing is throwing more and more voltage onto the CPU to try to force it to the advertised spec.

 

inside pictures linked below, as you can see some dust build up but nothing shocking:

http://img833.imageshack.us/img833/8964/pccpucoolercloseup.jpg
http://img189.imageshack.us/img189/4836/pcfancloseuprear.jpg
http://img267.imageshack.us/img267/6509/pcfront.jpg
http://img85.imageshack.us/img85/7001/pcrearexaustcloseup.jpg
http://img190.imageshack.us/img190/7743/pcsidecloseup.jpg
http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/17/pcside.jpg

Hope that helpes.

Thanks,

 

I wouldn't even be happy with 77c tbh, it's far from optimal. It's like mapping a car with leaner top ends to find that tiny bit of extra power. Just because it might work, doesn't mean you should do it.

Very sloppy tbh