My processor will no longer step above 2.2, and won't take Vcore at all...

Just before I installed my new watercooling last night I was doing the routine Vcore/MHz steps with my chip and recording temperatures - so that I could compare my air temps to my water temps. I found (to my dismay!) that my chip will no longer step above 2200 MHz, and won't stay stable with high Vcore voltages. I removed my motherboard and heatsink/etc. to measure hose lengths for my water setup, and then put everything back together to take down the temperatures of my steps again.

On close inspection I discovere that my chip has a small dent in one of the corners - very tiny, but definetely there, and it wasn't before. The chip still does 2200 MHz on a 1.625 Vcore - rock stable with the same temperatures I was getting before taking everything apart (33 degrees celcius, and I have tryed reseating my heatsink 3 times!) - but anything above that causes wondows to *freeze* when running prime95. There is no BSOD, no prime95 error message, just Windows XP freezing.

My temperatures are also all messed up in my BIOS - my chipset reads at 0 Degrees Celcius (impossible with the passive heatsink it uses!), and my processor reads at a believable temperature, that alternates every five seconds at even intervals with 22 Degrees Celcius for some reason...

The chip also won't take Vcore - when I raise it above around 1.8 Windows starts freezing again while running prime95, temperatures in ASUS Probe stay fairly low (below 45), and my BIOS tells me the temperatures are around 75 degrees celcius idle!! Again, reseating the heatsink and re plugging all my hardware does nothing - I even have a spare BIOS chip which I have tried.

My board is Vcore volt modded with a potentiometer, and my specs are in my sig. I am really worried about this - as it kinda wastes all the fun of my new water system! Again, the chip is rock solid and stable at anything below 2200 MHz.

*WHEW*

I solved my problem - I reinstalled Windows XP pro and reseated, cleaned, and repasted both the processor and heatsink.

This fixed everything - I changed my video card recently without reinstalling Windows or cleaning the registry, and this is probably what messed up windows...

The processor is still chipped - but it steps fine like before now, so I'm happy.

Thanks to the 20ish number of people who read this thread in the hopes of helping

it did seem like a really weird problem.

glad you solved it.

any guesses as to what caused the problem?

is the problem with temperature reading still occuring?

Yes - my BIOS reads my core CPU temperature as 22 Degrees Celcius when ASUSProbe reads it as 40 Degrees Celcius... The chipset Temperature readings seem to be accurate now (~24), I reflashed the BIOS again... I am really confused about this weirdness - but it doesn't seem to matter much. Prime95 stable for 9 hours so far at overclock in my siig, so I'm praying that there will be no further problems, and that everything is fine now (KNOCK ON WOOD!!! )

If I could figure out how to get MBM 5 to work with my board it might lead me to some new insights into this - but I can't seem to get it to work! (shamed I am...)

My water is up and running now as well (a slew of good things all happened simultaniously! ).

And my best guess is that I installed Windows XP Pro off of a scratched CD (The original Cd too...), and there was an error during installation while copying driver.cab - when i reinstalled windows it was from a fresh disc of a friends - so that might have been part of it. I also changed my video card before this started, and I didn't clean the registry and was even too lazy to remove some of the old stuff - so that might have contributed as well to the freezing... AND, there is still the chip in the processor