Quote Originally Posted by nugzo View Post
Hi ryan. Welcome. These forums are here to help you. no one will ever get mad at u asking for help (well they shouldn't anyways :p ). Have you removed the stock heat pipes and replaced the TIM? You may be over heating. drop your 1.2 from 1.7 to 1.5 and maybe lower your SB some. Definitely replace the stock Thermal interface material on the NB and SB with some Arctic ceramic or silver. if you don't have ceramic, be very careful though with the silver because it is conductive. On the VR's ( around the CPU) just inspect the tape to make sure it is making good contact. You don't want silver or ceramic there. Maybe change your memory to 5-5-5-15 for testing. I never had issues with 4x1gb so once you get past whatever is holding you back now, the 4gb shouldnt be an issue at all. What are your CPU temps like in the bios? Good luck!

Hi Nuzgo, thanks for the warm welcome and the speedy reply! Now, down to business.

I havent removed the stock heat pipes, or the TIM? whatever that is?

I purchased the MB back in november, and i was considering watercooling the entire system, north bridge, south bridge, cpu, 2 x gpu etc until i saw how much it cost. I would rather buy a whole new motherboard than spend that much watercooling. Im considering selling my pc and building another one over the next few months so i doubt it would be worth finding a non water cooling solution until then. Im currently looking at the intel x48 boards and i want to go ati 4870 crossfire instead of my current 8800gt sli.

The new system looks like its going to cost about £1400 but i might just leave it until next year if i can get this striker sorted. If i do keep this board though, what cooling solutions would you recommend for it? Im pretty concerned about the heat of the south bridge, the one with the republic of gamers black logo on.

Anyway if i touch it then i immediately burn myself, the damn thing must be hitting about 130 degrees C. Even so though, that feels about the same temperature as when my pc isnt overclocked! Surely it shouldnt be getting that hot though? If i do keep this board, and thats purely based on this overclocking succes, which heatsinks would you recommend that i replace the stock with?

Im also experiencing some freezeups in the bios, could the overheating be related to this? And im sick of these damn USB Init errors, i keep having to unplug my pc for half an hour seeing as the clear cmos button doesnt seem to do much. There seems to be so many things that can go wrong with this board. So many things to hold me back aswell, which makes this overclocking very time consuming.

As for my temps though, after about 15 mins in the bios they hover around the high 40's. Thats with my tuniq tower on lowest rpm to keep it quiet.

I have lowered my 1.2 option to 1.5 and my sb to 1.60 and its failing to get past the bios screen due to many of USB init errors. Is there any solution to this? it seems that every time i touch the bios settings, i get this error when i start up. After 30 mins of problem solving i get about one chance to try a new setting before im out of action again.

Right, booted up with the new settings and the windows loading screen doesnt come up.

BTW, as leeghoofd pointed out, my vcore in my bios is 1.525. I only put the 'actual' bit in the description of my settings above as i copied it directly from linflas' post. I just presumed thats what showed up in windows?

Attempt 2:

Vcore at 1.5, SB reduced to 1.55. USB INIT errors. After 11 unplugs, resetting cmos etc i have managed to get it to boot. Now im into windows hooray!

Maybe Not it has reset my settings to 2.4ghz. I really thought that was it! Restarted my pc and then im back with more USB init errors. Is this something to do with the settings im using? or maybe the bios version? 1303.