forced to overclock

[mdstone]

just got a new p4p800 deluxe motherboard and a new P4 3.0 Ghz CPU but,,, I am using 512M ddr 3200 from Crucial
and it runs everything fine in XP but when I play a game or render video it dumps back to window or reboots with no error report, it just dumps.
I had the Ram already (never had any problems with Crucial's memory before) and didnt want to explain to the wife why I needed to but new memory so I got to messing around and found that if I set to turbo mode and overclock to 20% with Asus's presets in the bios everything runs fine. So I am kind of forced to overclock and am running at 3.6Ghz and still have almost 20 degrees of overhead on the temps under a load.
I shouldnt complain about it but I still wonder why it is, maybe the power supply is weak at standard settings and gets enough voltage to the ram when it is bumped up.
I ran Memtest86 on it and it fails at the standard settings in the bios but passes when overclocked.
anyone else seen this sort of behavior?

thanks

 

[MDE]

That's really odd.

 

[santar72]

Thats is kinda odd. Maybe it turbo mode, its relaxing the timing of the ram since it overclocking. What's the ram's timing for 3.0ghz and oc 3.6ghz setting? Easiest way to find out is by running cpuz. You can find it here.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Do you have any idea how many poor bastages that spend a bunch of money trying to get that overclock can't get near it stable? They are hurling curses at you as we speak! Congrats and enjoy your most excellent :gift:

 

[gmcttr]

So... I wasn't the only one with wierd problems. I installed a p4p800, p4 3.0 and 2x256 Kingston Hyper X 3200.

At startup I often got the message " system failed due to overclocking". The thing is I wasn't overclocking. So I overclocked it to 3.3Ghz. No problem. If I set the "perfomance setting" to standard, it would not post. Had to be in Auto.

Last night I ran MemTest86 (not overclocked) and couldn't get through a single pass before it would hang. Swapped ram, etc. and still MemTest would hang.

My board came with the bios version 1012. Today I upgraded the bios to version 1015. End of MemTest problem. 10 passes without an error.

I hope this also took care of the "system failed" problem. Time will tell.

Try updating the bios. Asus' "AsusUpdate" software makes it easy.

 

[Peter]

Those "system failed" messages always happen when the board didn't fire up all the way through to the sign-on screen. Whether it was for overclocked CPU or other failures (like BIOS crashing because it's running in bad RAM) is unknown at that point.

So why does a ridiculous overclock help some RAM work that just wouldn't at normal speed? Simple ... because when the overclock gets somewhat high, the BIOS will back down on the RAM timings or even the RAM clock. So at a certain sweet spot in overclocking, the RAM actually runs slower than at non-overclocked speed.