Troubleshooting
From time to time, you may get to a point where the PC
won't post after you have done a "bad" overclock. The PC may appear to
be dead or, at least, you're getting a black screen. But don’t panic yet
- there are quite a few things you can try.
1. Remove the power
cord from the PSU. Often, just doing this for a few seconds is enough
to let the motherboard reset itself, especially on a board like the
P5B, which recovers well from a bad overclock. If that doesn't work,
move on to step 2.
2. With the PSU unplugged, locate the
CMOS clear jumper (see your manual for this). Move it to the Clear
position and leave it for a few minutes and remove the motherboard
battery. While it is clearing, press the on/off switch on the case
- this will help to discharge any electricity left in the capacitors on
the motherboard. If this doesn’t work, go to step 3.
3.
Repeat step 2, but this time leave the CMOS jumper in the Clear position
for a few hours - overnight if possible - and also remove the RAM, as
well as ensuring that the battery is removed. If that doesn't work, go
to the next step.
4. Remove the CPU and power on the board,
as you would do if a CPU were in place. Leave the system running for
between 30 and 60 seconds. Reset the CMOS again (as mentioned in step
2). Hopefully you should be okay now.
5. If your PC is
struggling at moderately low overclocks, make sure that you do
definitely have the RAM set at 1:1. Since reading the version of this
guide found on the HEXUS.community forum and Clunk's forums, a
few people have insisted on starting off with their RAM set to
800MHz or whatever it is rated at. But this isn’t going to work
because, when you start to increase the FSB speed, the RAM speed will
increase with it and you'll immediately be running the RAM faster
than it should go, resulting in an unstable system. If in doubt, set
the CPU speed to 266MHz and the RAM to 533MHz and take things from
there.
6. If you're having trouble getting stable at the FSB
speeds mentioned in the guide, simply try some other speeds. Let's say
that your board doesn't like an FSB speed of 300MHz. Well, don't panic,
just try 310MHz - and keep going until you find somewhere stable. This is
normal and all part of finding out how your hardware works. Just keep
an eye on the temperatures to make sure nothing is overheating.
7.
If you are experiencing any kind of graphics corruption - a jerky
desktop, say or slow graphics performance or low frame rates, then load
up CPU-Z and in the mainboard (motherboard) tab, look
at the Graphics Interface section and the value shown for Link Width. Assuming you're running a PCI Express graphics card, this may
have changed itself to 1x instead of 16x. To fix it, go into the BIOS
and change the PCI-e frequency from Auto to 110 (you can try any value
up to 110). Then save, exit, boot into Windows and check with CPU-Z
that the Link Width is now set to 16x. If it's still at 1x,
repeat what you just did but increase the PCI-e frequency another
notch. Check with CPU-Z and, if the Link Width is now at 16x, go into the BIOS and change the PCI-e frequency back to Auto. Hopefully, things
should be fine after that.
8. If you are still struggling to
get stable, another thing to try is swapping the RAM modules into
different slots. For example, if your motherboard is a P5B with black
and yellow slots and you have the RAM in the black slots, try the
yellow ones. We've found that the yellow slots work best on the P5B
and the black ones on the P5K but, as they say, your mileage may vary!
9.
Your multiplier is showing as 6x in CPU-Z when it should be higher (8x,
9x, 10x, whatever) and your CPU speed is showing as much lower than it
should be. Go into the BIOS and under the advanced CPU settings,
disable EIST/SPEEDSTEP. You should have already done this if you have
followed the guide.
10. On the P5K - if you have a separate
PCI RAID card and are experiencing problems with drive detection, try
disabling legacy USB.
11. Your PC2-8500 RAM (DDR2-1066) is showing as PC2-6400 (DDR2-800). This is because there is no JEDEC
(Joint Electron Device Engineering Council) spec for PC2-8500, so the
RAM makers use the highest existing JEDEC spec for DDR2, which is
PC2-6400. All this means is that you will have to manually set a
divider if you want to run your RAM at PC2-8500 / DDR2-1066 (see the
guide for more info on dividers).
12. Core Temp fails to load
when using Vista x64 - reboot your PC and, as it's booting up, dab
the F8 key and choose to disable "Driver Signing Enforcement". When you get
to Windows, Core Temp should now load up without any problems. This may
also sort out other programs that weren't working.
