tough time OC'ing my 970...

[vulcZ]

This is my first time running an EVGA board as my personal rig, so there's a few things I'm not used it (previous boards were all Asus). This is also my first i7-based rig so maybe it's related to that, who knows. Anyway I had some questions about the Classified 760 board. Is it normal for the system to shut down every time you reboot the computer? This even happens when I was running everything at 100% stock speeds. I could be in Windows, do some updates, reboot, and 5 seconds into rebooting the system will shut down for about 3 seconds, and then turn back on by itself. My previous Asus board did the same thing, but ONLY if I made a change in the BIOS, or if I cleared the CMOS, or cut power to the machine. My EVGA system seems to do it everytime I reboot, regardless if I'm overclocked or not. I haven't had any problems at all with the system (aside from overclocking troubles), so I'd assume this is problem a very normal thing with this board, but I was curious to see what others thought about it. Another thing is that this board seems to overvolt the QPI/VTT voltage quite a bit. I read on a few places that for 24/7 operation (which is what I'm going for), you shouldn't run the QPI/VTT higher than 1.4-1.45v. If I set it in the BIOS to 1.4v (+250mv), after I save the settings and reboot the BIOS will read the voltage as close to 1.6v! Is this normal? And if it's normal, then do I have to take overvolting into consideration and lower the setting accordingly so it's able to stay below 1.45v (overvolted)?

http://www.techreaction.net/2010/09/...-and-gulftown/

I tried following this guide but a lot of what it asks you to do didn't actually work for me. For example, where it asks you to drop your multipliers on the CPU and RAM so you can try and find your highest possible bclk, following their steps I couldn't get my system to POST if the bclk was set to 145 or above. I spent almost 2 hours messing with settings and no matter what it wouldn't POST. I almost threw this whole thing out the window thinking my chip is simply THAT bad. I then decided to try and overclock based on my own knowledge, and not so much what the guide was asking me to do, and I was able to POST at 176bclk (which is what my ideal bclk is for 24/7, if I can get there stable), and boot into Windows, although it wasn't stable. I'm not sure what part of the guide my motherboard wasn't liking, but I think it was related t the dropping of multipliers. Not sure exactly.

Anyway, sorry for the super long post, but the point is that I'm looking for help in overclocking my CPU I will admit, I'm a noob when it comes to i7 overclocking, as this is my first time doing it, but I pick up on these things pretty quickly. My goal is to run my CPU at 4.2GHz, and all 12GB of my RAM running at close to rated speed as possible. I know I probably wont be able to run my RAM at 1600mhz with a bclk of like 176, but I have no problem running it lower speed, but with tighter timings. I think I can handle that one on my own, but finding the right bclk, cpu frequency, and voltages is where I'm having the most trouble. My CPU IS watercooled, so I'm not too worried about voltages (although I do want to stay below anything that can kill my CPU in the long run).

i7 970
Classy 760 board running BIOS 77
12GB Dominator RAM 2GBx6 (1600 8-8-8-24@1.65v)
HD5970 (950/1200 1.2v VDDC, 1.15v VDDCI)
X-Fi Fatal1ty Pro PCI
ATi 650 HD dual TV Tuner PCI-E 1x

I listed my specs just in case there's anything anyone feels I should remove. Like if my tuner or sound card is hindering my OC, I'm open to the idea of removing them, etc. Last night I had OCCT fail on me 20 minutes. My settings were as follows:

-bclk@168 QPI/VTT +150mv (set to 1.3v, read as 1.4v)
-CPU@4038 Vcore 1.350v (load temps below 60*C)
-RAM@1686 Vdimm 1.650v (manually set timings to 8-8-8-24, the rest AUTO)

With the above settings OCCT crashed after about 20 minutes. I would run LinX or Intel Burn Test, but I think they have a problem because my page file is disabled. If I tell them both to use the maximum amount of RAM, the system will reboot as soon as the memory usage goes up to 95% or so. If I run the tests on Very High, or anything lower than MAX, it seemed to pass it fine, but I wasn't really sure how much my system was being stressed if all my RAM wasn't used. It's important for me that this OC is 100% stable

[vulcZ]

Also, what are the chances that all of my problems could be caused by having TURBO enabled? I just remembered that to be a common denominator.