Hello Apologies in advance for the long post. E8400 E0 Stepping A Biostar I45 TPower motherboard OCZ reaper 1066Mhz 2Gb x 2 matched pair Coolermaster 500w psu (might be 450 actually) Powercolor HD 5850 - stock clocks Acellero S1.2 cooler Windows 7 x64 sp1 (I can't find where to add a signature yet) I've been running the above setup for about 3 years with two of them with an FSB of 400 and 9x multiplier. I had the ram at 800Mhz. I've always been a bit nervous about overclocking and it was a shared pc for a while so I left it at that and it's been rock solid. Recently I've become a bit more adventurous and decided to up my ram to a different divider giving me 960Mhz. The vram in the bios showed 2.064v when set on auto so i set it to +0.1v and after a couple of failed boots set rcomp on setting 3 - I'm hoping some of you will have used the Biostar board and will know what I'm talking about Anyway, it booted fine and I ran Prime95 for about 20mins without errors (I know but i get impatient and technically the ram was still underclocked). The next day I was playing Guild Wars, I exited out of the game and the pc shutdown. I tried to recreate it but couldn't so left it as coincidence until it did the exact same thing the next day. I set the memory settings back and it's been fine for the last week. Yesterday I decided to put the ram back up to 960Mhz and all was fine for about 12 hours until I was doing something in windows control panel to do with desktop compositing and window shadows and it shut down again. Now it seems to me that when I'm doing something that involves the graphics card (Aero uses the graphics card for transparency, shadows etc) it's too much for the system. I've only had it shutdown once before, back in December, which I put down to overheating and a couple of days later the fan made horrible noises so I replaced the cooling. The thing is, is that this was before I decided to up the ram speed. I'd appreciate any ideas as it does seem odd to me that ram settings would have an adverse effect of the graphics card.
Welcome to the forums. I used to own almost exactly the same setup as you, and I remember having all sorts of problems getting some Kingston 1066 ram working at full speed. A quick search of the forum threw up this thread from 2009, which might help. My initial guess before someone more informed arrives is that you will want to manually set the voltage at 2.1v to overclock your memory reliably. The Biostar was an awesome board for the money, but I always hated the BIOS! So unintuitive
Thanks for the reply. I'm now thinking the ram is just a coincidence as it shut down again this afternoon and i'd reset the ram and the settings I'd changed back to 800Mhz last night. The pc simply shuts down. I'll be clicking an apply button or something and BAM! I'm staring at a blank screen accompanied by the sound of fans spinning down. It nearly always does it when whatever I'm doing involves a graphics change - going from a full screen game back to desktop or messing around with the aero settings when I'm using custom themes. The only time it didn't happen this way was when I was running dual eve clients across two monitors. I presumed it was a heat problem as I'd noticed temps on the card were getting towards 80degs*. The only other card I have is a HD 3750 but this only needs one power adapter so I was thinking if it's the psu that's the problem then the lower power draw of the card might hide the psu fault. * temps on the cpu and 5850 have been fine as far as I'm concerned.
OK, a couple more things to check: 1. What model number is your PSU? I would say if it's 450w it will be running at quite a high capacity on your system - I think you could potentially draw around 350-400w at full load depending on your other components. Not that this is necessarily linked to the problem, but worth considering. 2. Try reseating the card (you may have already done this if you have already swapped out the card with your 3750). 3. Probably goes without saying, but have you installed the lastest Catalyst driver? It might be worth uninstalling the current driver, running Driver Sweeper or similar, and then rebooting before installing the latest driver. 4. As a last resort, reset your BIOS to defaults, apply the 400Mhz FSB overclock (so easy isn't it?) and see whether the problem persists. If so than I'd suggest it's likely to be your GPU, power supply or possibly a motherboard fault. I RMA'd two of the I45 boards before I got one without gremlins! Don't lose heart, there are many much more experienced troubleshooters than I on this forum, and also a fair few who would have bought your motherboard a few years back on the recommendation of Custom PC. I found that the board was incredibly sensitive to the slightest changes in voltage settings, and I too definitely recall it just powering down without warning on quite a few occasions before restarting itself. Never worked out exactly what the issue was!
I went to move the pc while it was on to see if I could see the psu and the monitors went blank but the pc was still running. After shutting down I noticed the graphics card was indeed hanging out of the slot. Whoops Slightly more worrying was that one of the Accelero heat sinks for the memory chips had fallen off and that another of the heatsinks covering some of the vrms' was hanging off and only attached to one of the three it was supposed to go across . I'm hoping there's no permanent damage to the card. I'll have to find some thermal paste glue or something to stick the heatsinks back in. Meanwhile I'm back with my 3870 (i mis-remembered it) so I'll see what happens with that. The psu turns out to be a coolermaster silent pro 500w
I can post my bios revision & settings later. Running a stable 425 fsb with an e8600 (x10 multi). Ram @1020MHz. Trick for ocing the dual cores on this board is to use a low chipset & low fsb voltage, around 1.2v. Even the vcore is only at 1.25 on my setup. Will get a more consise breakdown posted later. Sent from Bittech Android app
I use this BIOS - P45AA924.BSP which is the 2nd latest, the last one is a beta & I had read it's supposedly not as good. Both available on the Biostar site. Regarding my settings: FSB:425 FSB latch 1333 Dram freq 1020MHz Enhance: auto All Dram/dram subtiming timing options on auto/spd. You can mess around with the r-comp profiles; at one time I remember I used the 5th one...I think. Anyway all auto is ok for me, but I'm using different ram, Dominators. Voltages: CPUv +0.100v DDRv + 0.200v Chipset v + 0.125v FSB v + 0.125v All other voltages best left alone. CPU skews left at default too. If this works for you will only hit 3.8GHz with a max x9 multi but that's a slight improvement. I can get a 444 FSB for a sweet spot of 1066MHz on the Dram but to do so I need to boost the vcore by +0.200v so its not really worth it. Hope this helps!
Thanks for the settings. Looking at my 5850 it appears I'd made a couple of errors with mounting the heatsink - one of the heatpipes was sitting on the heatsink of one of the memory chips and a couple of heatsinks had come off other memory chips and a vrm. I'll leave it for a few more days to see if there's any further problems and then have a go at your settings.
