P4t533-C and P4 1.6a overclocking disaster

Specs:
ASUS P4T533-C
P4 1.6a (Costa Rica)
2 X 256mb PC 800 Samsung 45ns RDRAM
NVidia TI 4400
SBlive Value!
Kingwin KT 436 Aluminum Case
Lite on 16X dvd

Everything worked great at first. I bumped it up to 133/33 fsb/pci getting it to run at 2.14 ghz. I got 12067 3dmarks and life was good.

So, I then went into BIOS ant tried for 150/30 FSB. After that the thing wouldn't get past POST. I didn't get any warnings or anything, but I would need to reboot the sysytem and let it put me in safe mode bios. I tried many times to get it to get past post using different ram dividers.

I then moved the voltage jumper to the user controllable setting and went back to bios and set it for 150/30 3x ram speed and 1.6volts to the cpu. This time it booted up fine and WCPUID siad it was running at 2.4 ghz. I then ran 3DMark 2001 se and this time I only got 9600 3dmarks. After that I went to SiSoft Sandra CPU arithmatic benchmark. My Drhystone MIPS was cut in half from my previous benchmark. What the heck is going on here?! The CPU temperature as reported by ASUS Probe was not very high, about 45c.

After that I went back into BIOS and set everything back to 2.14 GHZ 133/33. I set voltage and ram dividers to auto like I had before. I then went into Sandro CPU benchmark and my MIPS were still very low! So I then left my computer off overnight and ran Sandra cpu benchmark this morning. My MIPS were better but still nowhere near where it was before trying for 2.4ghz. And my games run much slower now as well.


EDIT-
Forgot to mention that after noticing such bad performance on the 150/33 I tried different voltage settings. 1.6 1.65 and 1.7. Actually getting the pc past the POST was iffy and random at any voltage.
EDIT-

You think you damaged your motherboard? NO. As what I can understand, nothing wrong about your motherboard or CPU.

At 150FSB, the AGP is underclocked (60MHz instead of 67 MHz). That's 10% underclock. In a graphics benchmark mainly test graphics card, you certainly will get lower results.

Nothing wrong!

At 150FSB, the AGP is underclocked (60MHz instead of 67 MHz). That's 10% underclock. In a graphics benchmark mainly test graphics card, you certainly will get lower results.

Click to expand...

And how would that impact his CPU scores? It does sound like there's more issues then just the AGP bus speed.

hmmm i have the solution! your motherboard is possessed i reccomend an immediate exorcism .... serioiusly though... the video card theory seems pretty valid to me, but i also have to agree with mjones.... try to fix the agp to it's original 66mhz.... if you can't try to rma the board from whoever you got it from and see what happens with the new one, i dunno what else could be the problem....

Thanks for the advice. While the AGP problem at 150 fsb may be valid, why would my CPU score drop so low even after I set it back to my original 133/33? Its a really wierd problem : (

I will see if I can get my hands on another mobo to see if I get better results. But I got a feeling that I somehow damaged my cpu...

i have had the sam problems pushing my 1.6a over 2.4ghz on my MSI - sis645 board, i'de load windows run sisoft and get a extreme speed score of a Pentium II? ....my problem was heat definitly it looks as the processor powered down, you know how tricky these P4s can get i'm assuming your getting a similar problem, maybe just enough heat to make it struggle... good luck

if heat's a problem... then hop on over to newegg.com and get an alpha pal 8492 heat sink.. with a panflo fan... this is probably the most quietest and best heatsink you can find.. .of course the heatsink plus fan cost around 65 dollars but hey

voltage

did your motherboard allow you to set the voltage to 1.85. I have the same board and a 2.0a. When I went to set the voltage to 1.85 the bios reset it too 1.6. I would let me set it to 1.7, but that was not stable enough for my cpu at 133. Sometimes it would run for a while, but i just need a way to get it up to 1.85. I haven't tried the wire trick yet. I have a thread if you want to check it out under asus mobo.

I am new and working on getting some benchmarks tonight. I am excited to compare them to yours. My computer is running at 120/30. I wonder if that effects the agp benchmark? Also I wonder how high I can set the PCI before it is TOO high. There are some setting for a 125 bus speed but the pci/agp speed seems too high. Wish i knew what was too high for my 4600 chaintech.

ok just my 2cents. I am learning so I hope this helped you some.

Dave

Y E S ! ! ! !
I finally fingered out the problem!
Hahaha, its kind of funny actually. Something I would have NEVER guessed in a million years.
Sober.

Well, last night I drank a lot of beer and played Morrowind. After awhile I decided it was time to overclock my pc furthur.

Normally beer + PC work = bad. But this time it worked out ok.

What I did was move my USB MS Intellimouse Explorer to a different USB port!

Now I can play around with the settings all I want.

I think part of the problem had to do with the boot up using USB device feature and high PCI bus speeds. My mouse was getting power the second I turned on my pc and would hang at bios with anything over 34 PCI frequency. With the mouse in the other usb port it doesn't get power until the OS loads.

The only problem that I have now is that I am still not getting good 3DMark scores. When I first assembled my pc and set it for 2.14ghz (133/33) I got 12067 3Dmarks. Now I am only getting 10069. I am going to try and reinstall all my drivers to see if that helps. I did load a bunch of games and DVD software that may have changed something.

An other cool thing is that my CPU is running really cool. I set the bios VCore to auto and it is only sending 1.63 volts to the cpu. Under load my cpu gets up to 40c.

I think 148/37 is the best setting for me. I tried 150/38 which is the max and Morrowind and SiSoft CPU arithmatic benchmarks would crash. I didn't bump up the vcore past 1.65, maybe 1.7 or 1.75 would do the trick. But why have to deal with loud fans and stressed components for such a small performance gain?

Anyways, thanks for all of your help in getting this running!

i had that performance problem once too....it was due to a wrong SB 128 PCI sound card driver....getting the correct driver fixed the problem......the wrong driver made the CPU utilization always very high for no reason......

sounds very much like your problem....i would fix the problem and try benchmarking at 150 FSB again...

Reinstalling my sound blaster live drivers fixed all of my problems.
MaXimus, will you father my children?

11870 3dmarks. I bet I can get it higher with a bit more tweaking of my sound card drivers. I will aslo try overclocking my video card

Darryl_D said:

if heat's a problem... then hop on over to newegg.com and get an alpha pal 8492 heat sink.. with a panflo fan... this is probably the most quietest and best heatsink you can find.. .of course the heatsink plus fan cost around 65 dollars but hey

Click to expand...

Or better yet the BEST AIR COOLER AVAILABLE TODAY - SWIFTECH MCX478 (Use some rheostat like FanMate to lower rpms).

Hey DMI you trying to call me out?

that's it i challenge you to a duel to the death

lol musta had too many better start tweaking with my comp eh Stoutale well anyhow
your wrong DMI currently the best heatsink is the Thermalright something 478
followed by the Thermaltake (which he already has)
followed by your swifty
followed by my alpha *cries* alpha oh why why????

You wouldnt happen to have AA running on 3D Mark by anychance?

You might of tested it with that setting and forgot it was enabled.

Darryl_D said:

...
well anyhow
your wrong DMI currently the best heatsink is the Thermalright something 478
followed by the Thermaltake (which he already has)
followed by your swifty
followed by my alpha *cries* alpha oh why why????

Click to expand...

LOL


Actually I just received Alpha PAL8492 and want to compare it head to head with my Swiftech MCX478. Will post results as they come.
Interesting enough, Alpha recommends to mount fan on exhaust rather than common intake setup.
I want to try bot configs on both heatsinks with the same fan to determine the best heatsink out of two with the best fan positioning (out of intake/exhaust).