Quote Originally Posted by banwell View Post
Having read all of this thread I cannot see what 'these' issues are. Many people (myself included) are happily running decent overclocks without issue - call us lucky winners in the CPU lottery if you like. If you don't believe me (or others here) - then go read Anandtech's review of the Ex4. They got along together just fine. And I am sure they did a much better job of putting the board and a CPU through its paces. But even they stopped at 4.8 (and I am sure they have more technical know how than most).

Yes - some people may need to RMA a board. It happens.

Not being able to get stable at some pre-defined idea of 'decent' overclock at whatever cost (including trashing your gear) is 'by the by'.

No CPU has a god given right to hit 4.6 / 4.8 or 5.0Mhz+. Its becoming plain to me that 4.5 and beyond is where most chips start to hit issues. Hell if they could all do 4.0Mhz even - don't you think Intel would market them as such?

All chips are different - and as has been proved many, many times over it's not the boards that are holding you back its the specific CPU. That why people will BIN them and charge extra to play.
When I hear someone mention that they can run a particular overclock just fine at one moment but then not be able to cold boot Windows at those same settings at some other moment, as mean6 did a couple pages back, then I'd say that sounds pretty reminiscent of the problem I described with my rig.

I could more easily accept that I've just reached the natural limit of my particular chip if I had just hit a point where the chip never booted or worked stable past. But when I've got a particular overclock running 8 hours Prime95 stable one moment and the rig won't even boot Windows at those same exact settings the next moment, it makes me wonder. If the CPU could run at that speed just fine before, then what's keeping it from booting now? Maybe it is the CPU, but if so that seems like awfully quirky behavior to me. Surely running a stress test overnight is a more difficult feat than booting Windows.

The only thing I can imagine that might explain this is if the chip was running at the bleeding edge of its overclocking capability at 4.6 and 8 hours of stressing it somehow degraded the chip slightly in such a way that it would no longer even boot Windows at that same speed. But that’s just pure unsubstantiated speculation as I’ve not heard anyone else mention anything like that with their CPUs.