I am having great difficulty overclocking my e8400 on my new MSI P7N Diamond motherboard. The same processor with the same RAM overclocked just fine without any voltage bumps on my EVGA 780i motherboard, but for the life of me, I can not figure out how to get this MSI board to do the very same thing. I am trying to get a 3.6ghz overclock going and it worked perfectly on the EVGA board and this processor is widely known to be easily capable of such an overclock, especially since I've done it before. I'm hoping you guys might be able to tell me what I'm doing wrong here. Here are my specs: Intel e8400 processor MSI P7N Diamond motherboard(Nvidia 780i chipset) 4 gigs(4x1gig) of corsair xms2 6400c4 ram 8800gtx x2 in sli 700watt seasonic PSU 3 SATA hard drives, 1 SATA dvd burner Soundblaster extreme audio x-fi soundcard Now, on my EVGA board, I'm pretty sure I achieved the 3.6ghz overclock by simply bumping the FSB to 1600 in linked mode. I am new to the Intel scene, having been an AMD man forever, so I'm not 100% knowledgeable about such things, but my memory tells me that's what I did. Doing the same thing with this MSI board, though, fully is not working. Here are some BIOS screenshots of what I THINK should work, but these settings just lead to cold boots. If you guys have any idea why these settings don't work, I'd really love to hear it.
Update, in case anyone ever actually read this. I was able to get it to boot at 3.525ghz seemingly stable. That's absolutely insane since my goal has been 3.6ghz. It just won't do it though, no matter what I do to the voltages. Here's a screenshot of what settings in the BIOS worked to get my current speed. Hopefully either someone will see a miraculous way to hit 3.6ghz or at least I will save some other poor soul the days of misery that I've endured trying to reach it on this board.
it's because this bios displays that value as how much above normal it is, not the actual value. I know, it's confusing. The other lines are all the actual values. And yeah, I'm running the latest BIOS and it's still a no-go. I ordered another board on which I will try the same thing, hoping mine's just a lemon.
Try slackening the RAM timings to 5-5-5-15, get the CPU right first. Just 0.125V extra on core looks quite modest.
Yeah I agree with both of those and tried them both. The ram speeds lowered stopped most of the cold boot issues, but no matter how much extra voltage I applied, it never became completely stable with any real overclock. So, I ordered an Asus Striker II Formula and I'm hoping third time's the charm. I'm really just sick of this MSI board. I've had other MSI products in the past and they were all good, but this board is giving me nothing but trouble. I'm gonna RMA it and my EVGA and maybe sell the replacements or find another use for them. Any buyers? =)
conclusion: I got an Asus Striker Formula II and it hit 3.6 ghz with no voltage changes and my ram runs at 4-4-4-12 and it took about 5 seconds of work and the system is super stable. So, the moral of the story is that this MSI board blows at overclocking and this Asus board is freaking awesome. Thanks for the help everyone.
