[Methodx]

When I overclock my cpu up to around 3.12 ghz, I'm fine. When I overclocked to 3.25 ghz I would get a few weird lines across windows xp and then windows would freeze. A dialog box would come up saying windows has turned off video acceleration on my vpu to protect it and then the problems would persist.

What's going on? When I overclocked, in the bios I locked the agp/pci to 33/66/100.

Thanks in advance!

[Evnas]

Southbridge may be heating up to much, causing problems with the PCI/AGP bus

[Methodx]

Thanks, I was thinking that because my computer was running pretty hot. I'm about to go to fry's to get a new cpu fan, can i get anything for the chipset?

Anyone else have any more detail?

[Evnas]

You can get southbridge coolers at quite a few online places, though I dont know if Fry's carries any

[Methodx]

What about the northbridge? My northbridge has a big heatsink, but no fan on it. For some reason DFI didn't include a fan and decided on passive cooling. Would this affect video?

[Evnas]

Most likely not. The northbridge deals with the CPU for the most part. The southbridge is what handles the PCI, AGP, and IDE traffic if memory serves

[Methodx]

Wow, sweet thanks for the help man. It was like talking on IM with you. Anyway, here's hoping fry's has tiny adhesive heatsinks.

[Methodx]

Well, I put a heatsink on the southbridge, but the same problem still persists. I also read somewhere that the northbridge is actually the one dealing with agp. You think this might be it?

Im thinking if perhaps I remove the passive cooling on the northbridge and put a fan on there this would solve it. You think so?

Basically I am running a 966 mhz fsb ok, but when I get any higher i start having the video problems.

I have a fan here, so I'll let you know, but plese offer your thoughts.

[Methodx]

Well the problem turned out to be that the ram timings were simply too tight, it had nothing to do with the chipset.

I just needed to loosen them up a little since the mobo decided to run my memory by itself at 5,3,3,2.

Although, the southbridge was still so hot I couldn't touch it, even at just 998 mhz fsb. I ended up finding a "video card cooling kit" that worked perfect. It came with a heatsink for the southbridge, which I stuck on there with thermal tape and now i can touch it and it feels almost room temperature.

Then I took the fan off the video chip cooler and thermal taped it onto my northbridge heatsink so now I have active northbridge cooling. Northbridge coolers with fans cost $30, I bought this for $10 and it came with a heatsink for my southbridge. This way I didn't have to waste the big, giant northbridge heatsink I already had. W00t.