Result of overclocking?

[Kjazlaw]

About a week ago I attempted to overclock my crappy cA2-stepping P3-700 to 868. I had the PCI bus clocked at 41. It booted fine and everything, and I think it was actually up for a while. I then proceeded to play UT, and it crashed hard. I rebooted, and as soon as the Win2k started running, it gave me an error telling me some system files had been corrupted. So I popped in a boot disk and ran scandisk. Lo and behold, like my entire Windows directory had major problems, in addition to the other partitions on that harddrive. Scandisk couldn't even fix it completely; it told me to run scandisk in windows. This, of course, was impossible. End result - me reinstalling Windows. So I was just wondering what could have caused this? My system files are on my WD drive which is on the onboard Promise ATA/66 controller. My Maxtor drive seemed unaffected. Is it the controller or the HD? Or something else?

 

[Kjazlaw]

One other nagging question I have: What is the "spread spectrum" option in the BIOS?

 

[Akkan]

I had a similar experience. I was overclocking a P3-500 and after Win2K crashed, it tried rebooting but said that the file "NTOS" or someting was corrupted. I was able to get around by simply booting into Win98 and copying the corrupted file from another comp. to damaged comp.

 

[BuddyHolly]

Overclocking can corrupt Windows. Badly..

 

[DDad]

" My Maxtor drive seemed unaffected"

Can't say about anything from the last year or so, but historically Maxtors haven't liked the "odd" PCI speeds- most would run with 37.5- above was a crapshoot. My initial bet is to try a IBM or Western Digital (Expert) drive and see if you still have a problem

 

[BeHeMOTH]

Well from what I know (spread spectrum) when enabled bumps the setting on the fps by 5 I think for preset if you will. When it's disabled you can go up or down in smaller steps. I guess it really depends on the motherboard. I hope that helps alittle. If I'm wrong could someone let me know!

 

[resinboy]

spread spectrum has to do with RF interference- if you have a board that causes interference to other local hardware, enabling this option is supposed to alleviate the problem.