Official MSI P7N Diamond (780i) Discussion/Review/Overclock/Guide/BIOS Thread

[loonym]

I cleared CMOS and got into the BIOS. The boot order is currently:

1. Floppy
2. WD Caviar 640GB
3. WD Caviar 640GB
4. Seagate 750GB
5. DVD-RW
6. DVD-RW

The two WD drives are in RAID 0. After getting the BIOS settings back to how they were, the computer booted up just fine!

This is the 4th or 5th time it's crashed today, though, so something's unstable. What do you recommend I change to try to stabilize it?

I apologize for my newness; I'm entirely new to overclocking. I'm looking forward to learning how all of this works. Thanks.

Edit: Just rebooted again out of the blue. Happened very quickly and gave no error.

Edit 2: I tried a 75 MHz overclock without touching anything else but RAM (running 1:1) and things are running stable so far. Perhaps it will stay that way. Here's hoping.

Edit 3: Still can't get this thing stable. I'm running at 2.55 GHz now and don't know what to do to get it to stop crashing. Just been slowly upping the FSB, but I can't keep doing that because the core temperatures are rising (currently idling at 39 C).

I think the best advice to you is to slow down a little and read a lot. Overclocking, to me, is more than just grabbing a set of good looking numbers that someone threw up on a random website screenshot. The numbers I decide on for my hardware are usually arrived at after many hours (days,weeks?) of playing. Most times this includes numerous flashes to find 'my' best bios, dozens of crashes, freezes and bios resets, a few reinstalls (trueimage is my friend), hardware swaps, and the settings hopefully evolve as I dream (nightmares?) up something new to try. When I see someone saying 'my system is crashing what do I do?' the first thing I look at is ram, then power supply, and cooling. If those are satisfactory the next is timings. But 99% of the time the answer to oc problems is voltage. Naturally more voltage=greater cooling needs. If I can't get stable I generally don't have enough voltage somewhere for a given oc. Then it becomes a process of elimination, trial and error, and most of all patience.

[gamin]

what about an USB devices problem ??? have you tried removing all your USB devices if you have any ? I know, this can be hard if you have both mouse and keyboard on USB...

@ Grimspoon : for now, I don't regret my choices (see my sig for full spec). looks like you're about to build a killer rig (bios 1.2b1 fixed the video corruption problem I always had, and also fix the .5 multiplier availablility for my E8500)

[Fiskbit]

loonym: Yes, I understand that; all hardware is different, and I don't expect overclocking to be a breeze. I'll be holding off on trying to achieve a high clock until I have more adequate cooling, and I realize that even then it will be very slow as I tweak lots of stuff and run stress tests for long periods of time. The thing that concerned me here was that the board isn't running at stock, but I recall that other people earlier in the thread had that issue. I'm getting a lot closer to stability now, with a higher clock. Looking good.

My power supply shouldn't be an issue. Cooling is also fine; temperatures are all safe. My RAM is currently at 566 (1:1 with FSB). Its timings are 5-5-5-15. As for voltage, I'm avoiding increasing it, as I'm running stock cooling. My current settings may be working, as Prime95 has been running for a while without fail, but it's too early to tell. Should I be tightening the timings on my RAM at all?

Thanks much, loonym. Your posts regarding success with this board in this thread eased the worries I developed after ordering the board and reading about some of the early troubles people came across.

gamin: My keyboard isn't USB and my mouse, while USB, is hooked up through an adapter. I've had a USB cam hooked up at times, but it didn't seem to have any negative effect (though the extra beep when powering up concerned me for a bit until I realized it was the USB!). I'm actually a bit surprised that I haven't come across several of the problems others have seen, such as SATA issues. The machine's running a lot more stable now, so I'm hoping I don't run into any more problems. Aside from not running at stock, I'm really, really liking what I've seen of this board so far.