Quote Originally Posted by SoulsCollective View Post
Mate, you need to chill - I said that the P5E3 was an odd board to find stable settings on. Which it is - just read over the posts in this thread. Noone's commenting on whether it's a bad board full stop (which reviews and some outstanding results say it definitely is not) or whether it's just down to an immature BIOS. Calm down, noone's attacking you or the P5E3 Premium, just wanting to try and find stable settings and sharing our experiences with it. You're not helping the situation by making snippy posts telling XtremeSystems members that they don't understand what a BIOS is.

Back on topic, I'm starting to think these low-or-changing-load crashes are definitely down to RAM CLK skew not being set right. By way of experiment, I'm trying different CLK skew settings, and finding that if I deviate too much from what I'm running now then all benchmarks except SuperPI will run fine for as long as I want to keep them going for, and yet I'll get random reboots and shutdowns at low load or when ramping up/down (eg. gaming). When these skew settings are very close to ideal, SuperPI will run fine, but extended gaming will still trigger reboots, so it's a good indicator of when you're getting close.

Out of curiosity, are you running the PERFORMANCE setting for loadline calibration? It is my understanding that using that setting can cause exactly the condition that you are describing as the cpu will actually recieve less voltage while idle than when under load. Even when that is not the case, increased "bounce" will mean that the cpu is subjected to excessive voltage for a few milliseconds as well as more significant droop for a few milliseconds that can lead to this kind of instability. Anandtech went into detail regarding this a couple of months back. Sorry if I am off base, but I figured it was something to consider.