post-overclocking madness

[MELVIn]

So I found this neat little thing in my BIOS, called 'Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker', which is found on Gigabyte's motherboards, and so I decided to try and push my system up a notch. I read up on a few things and decided to go for it.
Everything seemed fine.

I got a pretty big performance increase in Far Cry 2, until I got a one second bluescreen and my PC shut down, started again, shut down, started again, shut down, started again, and then every setting I made in the MIT was back to default.

But I didn't give up, so going by my motto "Fuck it, what's the worst that could happen?", I tried again, this time by only a small amount of what I did the first time. And now, after a few hours of stresstesting and the such, I've decided that this time it's working fine.

But I wanted to post some pics and have you lot take a look, and see if you find something that's wrong/dumb/insane/brilliant, and explain why. I fancy myself a great knower of various software issues, but when it comes to hardware I'm pretty lost.

This first one would be temperatures when idling and voltages:





Here are all the values and the such for the hardware:





Here's the result of a quick 14 minute stress-test I did to see if putting a external desktop fan next to my case would make any difference. (Seems to affect the motherboard temperature mostly.)




So any ideas, suggestions, insults?

[Dionysos]

You should stresstest with prime95 (if I remember correctly) and such, ideally for several hours. Just gaming isn't enough, strictly speaking. Every individual cpu and config is different, so I think you just reached an unstable clock/ratio configuration before.

Ehm... and I don't know about your motherboard, but with mine it's not recommended to have differing ram in the respective ram-channels. I'm a little confused as to whether they're actually running on different mhz/timings?

[zombie@computer]

theres an 11 degree celcius difference in core temps... lol

[Ale]

First off, get CPU-z, Prime95 and RealTemp. Second, try to do a remount of your heatsink if the temps between both cores are 5-10 off.

[xoqolatl]

Temps are different between cores because software readings don't mean anything, not because the heatsink is mounted bad. E7200 is a single die CPU (means there is one piece of silicon containing both cores), so temps can't be different by that much physically. Everest, CoreTemp, RealTemp... all these work by reading a value from special CPU register. That value is how many degrees left to Tjmax (an arbitrary value set by Intel, specific to CPU model and stepping, around 100 deg Celsius for most Core 2 CPUs)). Thermal diode embedded in the CPU is designed to detect when the temperature crosses Tjmax, NOT to provide an accurate reading. It's only half-decent when the temperature is close to Tjmax, and the farther from Tjmax (the cooler CPU is) that less accuracy it has.

@ Melvin I am not sure WTH your RAM setup is. For best performance and compatibility, that 2 GB OCZ Stick should be in channel A, and these two Corsair sticks in channel B. On the motherboard, you should either have:
dimm socket 1: OCZ 2GB
dimm socket 2: Corsair 512 mb
dimm socket 3: empty
dimm socket 4: Corsair 512 mb

or

dimm socket 1: Corsair 512 mb
dimm socket 2: OCZ 2 GB
dimm socket 3: Corsair 512 MB
dimm socket 4: empty

where 1 is the closest to CPU.
TBH it won't make a noticeable difference in performance, but it should gain you some stability and more OC headroom.

[MELVIn]

So after some more experimenting I've decided to just put everything back to default. There was barely any performance increase once I got the settings stable, so I just decided to be on the lookout for new hardware.

I did however move my RAM sticks as you suggested xoqolatl, and I don't know if it's just a placebo effect but everything ram-dependent seems to be running a little bit better.
Thanks everyone for your suggestions and help. Once again I walk from the madness that is hardware a little bit more smarrt!

[xoqolatl]

Glad I could help

EDIT: If you're up to more experiments, here's what I would recommend:
Set your FSB to 400 and CPU multiplier to 6.5. CPU clock will be 2600 MHz - just 66 MHz more than stock. You might have to bump the CPU voltage slightly.
Set your RAM divider to 1:1, or RAM clock 400 MHz, or DDR-800, and RAM timings to 5-5-5-18. Set RAM voltage to either the nominal voltage of OCZ stick or of Corsair sticks, whichever is higher (nominal voltage can be found on the module sticker). For these settings to be stable you might have to bump MCH (northbridge) voltage a bit.

I'm saying this because FSB throughput is a major bottleneck on LGA775 platform. Just by bumping your FSB, with the same CPU and memory clocks, you can gain a lot of performance. Choose a benchmark (best would be a game you regularly play) and try to verify if you gain any performance.

[MELVIn]

I did everything on that list, and once again you're my new favorite person in the whole world. There was a pretty big increase in performance indeed. (I even got it right the first time!)

It's especially noticeable when I'm recording guitar tracks and have like 12 effects running live at the same time.

thanks a ton for the help sir!

[xoqolatl]

Glad I could help

you're my new favorite person in the whole world.

Yeah