Can overclocking a motherboard damage the FSB?

[Valadar]

Hi all.

I have a question which hopefully someone can answer.

I recently acquired a Core 2 Quad 9400 CPU which I put in my old MSI P35D3 Platinum motherboard. The problem is that my copy of Windows 7 Ultimate 32 bit never picked up the other 2 processors. I tried overclocking the FSB to see if that would help and still no success. I then tried overclocking the VTT, NB and CPU voltage to within the "white" (acceptable levels) in the BIOS. Then after increasing the FSB to about 400. The computer would not switch on. I had to go somewhere quickly. When I got back I tried to switch the computer on but the display would not come on. I then tried resetting the BIOS by pressing the reset button of the BIOS on the motherboard and then had to keep trying to reset and power on until eventually I got the computer to boot up. Afer this I noticed that my Windows would tell me that my Nvidia graphics card driver would stop responding and need to be restarted, this went on for a while. I thought it was the CPU so I put that in another computer - (Gigabyte DDR2 motherboard) and that computer worked fine with the CPU and showed the correct number of cores with the Q9400. My P35D3 also worked perfectly with my original Core 2 Duo E7300 CPU. However when I put in the Q400 my computer refused to allow the display driver to come on (would not start up) My question is can overclocking the motherboard do damage to the FSB and thus prevent it from working with a CPU that it worked before with?

If anyone has some insight. I would glady appreciate any feedback

 

[King107s]

Sure, overclocking *could* damage all kinds of things but its much more likely that you have a bent pin or it wasn't full seated etc...

Its also much more likely that one of your settings in the BIOS is incorrect.

For a better answer please list out all of your hardware and BIOS settings.

 

[Valadar]

Hi King107s

Thank you for your reply. My hardware consists of the following a MSI P35D3 Platinum motherboard, RAM is Super Talent 3GB DDR3 1333, Graphics card was a MSI NX8500GT 512MB, Hard disk is a Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm 32MB cache. Case is a Raidmax Super Helios. I will have to get my exact BIOS setting later to post. But on my motherboard it was a jumper to setting the frequency of the FSB from 200MHz to 333MHz. The CPU is a Core 2 Quad 9400 1333FSB. My Core 2 Duo E7300 runs at 1066FSB. At the time with the 9400 my memory was overclocked to over 1333Mhz and the 9400 CPU was tested and it worked on a Gigabyte GA-EG31M-S2 with 4GB DDR2 with the above mentioned graphics card and 320GB hard drive. Thanks again.

 

[King107s]

I'm not sure that the super talent ram you have is compatible with that mainboard. Its listed as only supporting DDR3 1066.... Which model of ST RAM are you using specifically?

With a FSB of 333MHz, 8x multiplier and 1:2 DRAM/FSB divider your CPU and RAM should run at stock speeds of 2.66GHz and 1333MHz. You should set the RAM voltage and CAS timings to their recommended specs and leave everything else on auto to see if it will boot.