I'm thinking it must be the board as well, I've tried downclocking already with the same results. Guess I'll get onto Asus tech support and see if they have any bright ideas.
The intention is good but don't expect nothing. The last time I contacted them.....well it was a taiwanese girl who answered me ^^ With a pre-answer list. I you ask something outside the list, it's over lol
@faugusztin The specific Auto/XMP/Manual setting I am talking about on the Asus board just gives you access to the BCLK and memory frequencies (which I left at 100 and Auto respectively anyway). All the other settings are still on the auto settings they were before. @TheBlackSwordsMan Yeah I feared as much - I went the email support route instead as I don't have the time or patience to deal with call centres, let's see if they come back with anything.
If you get no luck before going down the route of rma-ing or giving up, as i stated before take photos if you have camera of all your bios settings that you set for the overclock to see if we can see something you have overlocked...no harm in spending 5 minutes doing this for all the time you have spent on it already..following the guides like i did should give you the overclock..especically as you have cleared cmos of any gremlins and flashed your bios...i am perplexed myself to what it could be now.
OK here's the settings for a completely basic overclock up to (gasp) 3.8GHz Basically everything is set to the default other than the CPU ratio which I've changed from Auto to 38 in the first shot.
I also found this thanks to someone on the Asus forum - http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1578110 It didn't help me but it's a great guide written by an Asus technical bod.
If it's just locking up randomly and not working on Auto at all, it sounds like overheating or a power problem maybe. Try overclocking, then booting from a Linux LiveCD - remove the Corsair SSD from the situation entirely. If it still crashes after about the same time then at least you know that's not the issue either.
Definitely worth a go, thanks, I'll try it tonight. It is rock solid when at stock speeds and I haven't yet experienced any random crashes when using the "out of the box" settings. When I get the freezes it is completely predictable - immediately the Windows logo stops animating on boot, 100% every time I try to change the CPU ratio or the RAM speed. I even get the same two flashes on the HDD LED every time, completely predictable.
Have you tried letting it sit for a few minutes on the windows boot screen? You probably are getting hard freezes, but I have a wierd situation where everyone once in awhile windows will get to the animation and stop with no HDD activity and just sit there for 30-75 seconds before it continues to boot. I have no idea what the heck it is doing, but my mouse stops responding (IE the little laser doesn't "light up") as well. I am using an SSD though. 95% of the time it is a super fast boot, but like every twentieth or thirtieth time it has that "un-responsive" long boot. Maybe it is windows trying to detect some kind of phantom hardware change or something, I don't know. Just a thought.
I left it for an hour once just in case, although I haven't done so recently. A good thought though, and hopefully one which I might be able to rule out (or not) by booting from a Linux CD as Bindibadgi suggests. Also there's a new BIOS out, 1401 which apparently addresses hardware compatibility (nice and vague!) so I'll give that a go as well.
Success! I can enable XMP and set the CPU ratio to 45 and boot into Linux Mint from CD. So, what now? Is it a case of ditching the SSD ?
Yet more success. Now that we isolated either Windows itself or the SSD as the problem I tried playing with the SATA ports. It turns out that the temperamental little f'er will only boot when overclocked when I only have one drive in each *pair* of ports. So, SSD in a normal SATAII port, eSata connector from the backplate in a normal SATAII port, data drive in a SATAIII port and the optical drive in a Marvell SATAII port. WTF? Still, it works so who am I to complain. Thanks all for the suggestions.
