Wait untill the paste settles. Bout a week or 2. Make sure temps are stable running prime 95. Then slowly oc it
@Sog - There's no one on here I would trust more to buy some parts from but even still, being able to buy a 2500k, mobo, and 8 gigs of RAM for $330 brand new is too good to pass up. It'll be plenty of power for me. @Erock - Ok, I figured I should wait a bit. Better safe then sorry I suppose.
The way I do it to ensure everything is running perfectly is this: At first boot, go into bios and overclock 200MHz (keep stock voltage) Install Windows and drivers Do your reboots run Prime95, 3DMark 11, Furmark Make sure they are all stable and no errors Run for a day or two, if no crashes then overclock another 400+ MHz (as far as you can safely go on safe voltage and temperatures and 100% stable) going 200MHz right away with no extra voltage ensures you have a quality chip. If it cant even do that small of an OC perfectly fine then you shouldnt even bother overclocking further later on down the road and should probably find a reason to RMA the chip since it is very poor quality
Hmm, yeah, well, thats been my rush to OC in the past as well. When you get a new piece you want to know what its capable of right away, or atleast I do. I'll end up playing with a little OC after testing to see if it runs fine at stock. I don't want to OC before posting and running a prime test because what if the chip is faulty but intel wont let me return because they saw I OC'd? BTW how the hell do they even know if you OC or not?
It is impossible for a company to see if you overclocked it and it is also completely impossible for a company to tell if you over volted it too. Plenty of people ahve dead CPUs from a power surge or the like, there is no way to prove you purposely put a bunch of extra voltage into the processor and it died instead of just any random power surge. I have only had 1 defective CPU in my time, it was an Intel 2600k. I got it and did my normal stuff, not stable at all. Lowered the clock, not stable, tried more voltage to see if I could get it stable, and it was marginally better until the CPU straight up died on me from the additional voltage. I didnt even put that much more into it, well within safe margins. So I took it back the next day and got a replacement right away no questions asked. The company then sends it back to Intel as defective (which it was). CPUs only have a 7 day warranty anyway, so you better be sure you KNOW that chip you have it working right, stable, and of good quality before those 7 days are up.
I got my parts and everything seems to be running fine. I'm having an issue getting to the BIOS screen of all things though. Even more odd is BIOS will load when I use the onboard GPU but if I use my GPU it will not show BIOS, it tries to load the screen but fails, and just shows a black screen with a mouse cursor in the middle that wont move. My card works fine when I just boot to windows, so I'm not sure what the deal is, any ideas? My external HD isn't working right either. It shows it in My Computer but it wont let me see the files, it wants me to format it. I don't have another comp right now to test it on a diff system either. Would like to not have to format it because I have some important files on there.
The bios is probably set to load onboard GPU first then PCI-E GPU second? Somewhere in there you can swap it around and that might fix your problem. Dont know about your hard drive, sound like something is corrupted on it and that's why Windows wants you to reformat it.
I had this problem twice before. For the first incident a BIOS default reset fixed it, if I remember correctly. I was experimenting with overclocking and had no clue what the hell I was doing. A HARD reset- as in jumper reset - was how it fixed. Evidently, when you play with the wrong stuff, the north and south bridge get pretty screwy. Just a guess, but I'd try that... especially if you have been playing around wit them. If that doesnt work, take the video card out and let it boot on the onboard. Do you get into Windows? Can you try running a hard drive scan to see if there are any errors? Can you update your drivers for your new video card? If its yes to all of those and you can do all of those tasks without fail, then shut the computer down and put the new card back in. bet it'll work. If not... well then it may be the second problem. My cat decided he was mad at me and thought it would be fun to climb up a potted palm tree in my office and take aim at my rackmounted hardware. What did he hit? My video card. It blew up my video card and shorted out my motherboard. But it was a slow death. I mean, of course I noticed the cat took a piss on my stuff. He got to meet the wall pretty hard after i found that one.... but I cleaned it up as best I could and everything was working fine... no smells, nothing unsightly. But the video card was real screwy as I dont think I was able to thoroughly clean the inside. It died over the next couple of days- blue screens and all.. and then it started doing exactly like what you are saying. Turned out, the video card port on the motherboard and the video card had shorted. So, have a cat? Kill him and I bet your computers will thank you.
Haha, I doubt it was my cat, I'll try out some of the other ideas though thanks guys. As for external HD I think I may have deleted some hidden files I was not supposed to and maybe thats why its not registering, lol.
I tried resetting CMOS and have toyed with any setting that might be putting onboard GPU as priority but to no avail. There is a setting which lets me choose priority of either PCIE/PCI or iGPU and it's already set on PCIE which is what I would want. This just seems odd as hell to me, BIOS boots fine with onboard graphics and it tries with my GPU but it ends up just showing a cursor in the middle (unmovable). Otherwise everything is working fine, boots to windows, plays games, etc etc. I guess I'm going to try calling manufacturer?
Try unplugging it and plugging it back in a few times in a row and let it load completely each time. It might give you a good go one of the times. Or, try it with other computers to get to your information.
Yeah ive probly tried unplugging and plugging back in more times than any other normal human would have. I've tried everything. I'm almost positive now that I deleted some hidden files I was supposed to leave. In all honesty I just wanted my Kingdoms of Amalur save game off it but starting over is no biggie lol.
did you ever try just onboard? and what about safe mode? Im starting to lean more towards something got boned on the windows install, or at least something software related... though im not sure how thats possible- maybe bad luck and a virus?
Shrug, I still haven't figured out the GPU thing. I just plug my monitor into the onboard graphics if I want to enter BIOS for now. Moved onto CPU overclocking. Honestly all kinds of weird stuff with this board keeps arising, I'm starting to think something is screwy. The newest thing is voltage randomness. I can't for the life of me get my voltage in BIOS to match my voltage in CPUID/HWMonitor. I have it set on custom set voltage with Speedstep turned off. Regardless, my BIOS will say voltage is 1.175 for example and then in CPUID it will be 1.23. NOT ONLY THAT, in CPUID it will fluctuate between 1.23 and 1.20 BUT it will be 1.23 when idling and lower to 1.20 once I start Prime95. WTF? So honestly, I'm getting annoyed, I'm too OCD for it to be doing this to me. Any ideas about this voltage issue. Why is it not only off from BIOS reading but fluctuating in the wrong direction? I'm still just going to go by BIOS readings but god damn I wish it matched software readings just so I know. EDIT: BIOS has a monitor tab and the voltage it shows in monitoring doesn't even match the voltage next to where you increase or decrease in the tweaking tab. Not only that tweaking it never adds up correctly. I can add 0.040 and it subtracts 0.005 or something random sometimes. So I just don't even know what to look at now.
It's kind of looking like no matter what you put the voltage at it stays on auto. It acts like it's letting me choose and I have everything set so that it should be letting me choose but its just working. If I up the CPU multiplier it ups the voltage.
This is normal behavior. It should actually drop far lower. This is called vdroop. On my 2600k I had (sold to Blackice) it runs at 1.425v at idle but once load goes up on the CPU voltage will drop to 1.35v. You get around this with load line calibration. This however is very bad when used improperly and will kill your CPU. LLC detects a voltage drop from load and will increase vcore based on load to counteract the drop. However, it puts too much into it and spikes for a split second before it settles down. And when LLC turns off it dips for a split second as it turns off. So when processor is working and load on the cores are varying, you are hammering your CPU with huge voltage spikes if you set your LLC improperly. I usually only set mine at the lowest setting, or maybe one up from lowest (usually there are 4 settings). Setting to highest is a a sure way to fry your processor. bios reading isnt necessarily right, nor is your program. They may read from a different sensor or implement different thing sin the code to "calibrate" what you are at. Normally the bios is wrong actually. The only way to know for sure what voltage you are at is get out a digital multimeter and read the certain points on your motherboard. This is why high end OC boards comes with easy to access voltage readout points on the board already. Voltage will also be different because of your PSU. Lets say you set 1.5v in the bios, but your power supply is really good and puts off 3.38v on the 3.3v rail instead of the exact 3.3v. So this means the calibration is slightly off and even though it is set to be at a certain point, the PSU is supplying additional power already and giving you a bit more than you set. Plus the regulation isnt perfect either so there is that to think of. As for you adding a certain amount and it not working or giving a different voltage, I dont know. Id say it has to do with how Gigabyte implemented the bios and the time spent on refining it. Since it is their cheapest board, I doubt much time was spent on its development and tweaking. They probably just re-used a bios from the same board but a P67 chipset and changed a couple things in the code to make it work "right" with the new chipset and called it a day. But at least the hardware design is pretty decent