OK so without rebooting I tried increasing the ICH Vcore to 1.15V, and went into Intel Matrix, and r-clicked on the failed drive, clicked "mark as normal," and the drive went normal and the RAID array began rebuilding!

Holy crap, if I'd only know this 3 mos ago I could've saved myself a needless RMA! And why doesn't EVGA know to try this? They did not tell me to try it when I called 1/4/10. Nor did anyone tell me to try this for my failing SATA issue!

So be advised, I think everybody with an X58 should increase their ICH Vcore at least to 1.1V if not 1.15V. It may fix the USB lockup issue as well.

I dont know what to tell ya. I just tried SoaSE. I maxed everything out. Not a single issue..

I do that with all my games, its able to handle it fine. L4D2, Borderlands, Dragon Age, BioShock 2, many more. Tried a old copy of a Star Wars RTS...I think the FPS meter topped out...

As its been said before man...12 gigs of RAM. Some chips like it, some chips dont. Its probably your chips IMC thats angry. It might not be tho. I dont know what to offer anymore, but im sure someone does have something to tell you.

Did you ever pass over 20 passes of LinX and 8 - 12 hours of Prime?

Are you joking? lol. Sins of a solar empire huh. My system would destroy that game. Even if I lowered my vcore to 1.29375 which usually errors on test 15, i can still run benchmarks and play games with a 1.2875 which errors on test 7 or 8. At 1.3 vcore i can pass 110+ linx tests and prime 95 blend 12 hours, not to mention, crysis, left 4 dead 2 , AVP, Dirt, Farcry 2, microsoft flight sim X, you name it.

What you are experiencing could be a few things.
1. Your ICH, IOH, and ICH/IOH are too low (for powerful cards like the 5850 in xfire I would increase all of these)
2. The game isn't liking your video drivers and/or your dx11 xfire cards are overclocked.
3. All the crashing from being unstable screws things up, maybe why your Raid got messed up as well. Im sure you were overclocking while running windows on RAID.

Im downloading this game and i will try it out with unstable overclocks, see what happens.

I have been testing 6-ways to Sunday to try to find the previous cause of my instability. And no I did not have Windows update turned on. I have not updated any drivers. Two days after Post #33 the instability went away (on Feb 24) and never returned, despite my detailed notes and logs of all my settings; I re-created all the same settings and could not re-create the instability. What's more, SoSE no longer had those artifacts I spoke of with those same settings. I wonder if increasing my CPU uncore speed had anything to do with that instability, bc it was after I tried that and went back to "auto" that I was still having those instability problems. If it was, resetting the uncore to "auto" did not immediately restore stability, like it had a lingering effect for a day or so. I have not tried changing uncore again since, and I still had instability when I reset uncore to "auto" so it was not part of my attempt to recreate the instability. I'm not going to mess with uncore any more.


So a couple of days ago I resumed regular OC trials. I found it much easier to OC to 190 Bclock than before with excellent stability. It was like I 'broke' something 'in', allowing the system to work awesome. It also seemed that ICH 1.15Vcore was a bit much, had better luck with 1.10V, so that's what I am running right now. I had some lockups on Windows shutdown when I lowered CPU PLL to 1.65Vcore on Feb 22 & 23, so I have tried 1.70 and it seems stable. Also I have been able to achieve higher Bclocks now with CPU 1.26875Vcore as opposed to before Feb 20. As a matter of fact, I have not hit the ceiling of that yet, since my core0 peak temp was hitting 81 I quit trying higher Bclock; it was at 191 (4.0GHz @ turbo 21). Another thing, I tried it again and saw the same results: When I dropped VTT from 1.2 to 1.125 LinX sped up 10%, from 709-715 sec to 645 sec, nothing else was open other than temp monitoring, no AV, no LAN or Internet conn. The drop to 1.15V produced ~693. These numbers were consistent among >10 passes done on each setting.


I have passed LinX 50 times in 9:34:38 peak 50.3283Gflops settings: prob size 36585 mem 10240; peak core temps (RealTemp) 81/80/77/77. Passed P95 20 minutes each of three tests. 3DMark 06 v1.2.0: 25,373 CPU 6650, SM 2: 9474; 3: 12903 (No Graphics OC yet).

Now I am going to leave this OC as is for a while and concentrate on my GPU OC. But here is my current updated BIOS template:


Mother Board ( EVGA X58 SLI E758 )                                                       
Drivers ( ? )
Bios ( SZ2X )                                                                                                     
CPU (920 D0 E-Leet says "stepping: 5" )
CPU Cooler ( Zalman CNPS9900LED (air cooled), AS5 )
Memory (Corsair HX3X12G1600C9 SRAM set of 6 (2GB each stick) DDR3 1600 triple-channel memory 9-9-9-24 1.6V )
PSU ( Corsair HX1000W )
GPU (Dual ASUS Radeon HD 5850 in crossfire )
Drivers ( 8.660.0.0, "Driver packaging version 8.66-090918a-088905E-Asus" )
Operating System (Windows 7 64b Home premium )


Frequency Control
CPU Clock Ratio ( 20X )                                                                                         
CPU Host Frequency (Mhz) ( 190 )                                                                      
MCH Strap ( auto )
CPU Uncore Frequency (Mhz) ( auto )                                                
CPU Clock Skew ( 0 ps )
Spread Spectrum ( Disabled )
PCIE Frequency (Mhz) ( 101 )

Memory Feature        
Memory Speed ( Standard )
Memory Control Setting ( Enabled )
Memory Frequency ( 1520 Mhz / 2:8 )                                                                
Channel Interleave Setting ( 6 Way )
Rank Interleave Setting ( 4 Way )
Memory Low Gap ( 2G )
tCL Setting ( 10 )
tRCD Setting ( 10 )
tRP Setting ( 10 )
tRAS Setting ( 30 )
tRFC Setting ( 88 )
Command Rate ( 2T )


Voltage Control
EVGA VDroop Control ( Without VDroop )
CPU VCore ( 1.26875V )                                                                                                
CPU VTT Voltage ( +25mV / 1.125V )
CPU PLL VCore ( 1.7V )
DIMM Voltage ( 1.60V )
DIMM DQ Vref ( +0mV )
QPI PLL VCore ( 1.2V )
IOH VCore ( 1.2V )
IOH/ICH I/O Voltage ( Auto / 1.5V )
ICH VCore ( 1.1V )
PWM Frequency ( 800 )


CPU Feature
Intel SpeedStep ( Disabled )
Turbo Mode Function ( Enabled )
CxE Function ( Disabled )
Execute Disable Bit ( Enabled )
Virtualization Technology ( Disabled )
Intel HT Technology ( Enabled )
Active Processor Cores ( All )
QPI Control Settings ( Enabled )
QPI Link Fast Mode ( Enabled )
QPI Frequency Selection ( 4.8GT/s )
OC Recovery ( Enabled )

PnP/PCI     PCI Express
Maximum Payload Size ( 256 )
 
Power Management Setup
ACPI Suspend Type ( Default / S1 (pos) )   
HPET Support ( Enabled )     
HPET Mode ( 64-bit ) 

BLOG:

Well I've achieved my graphics OC. Now I am exploring reducing my mem latencies. When I tried reducing the second number, LinX erred on 1st try. I tried 9-10-9-24-88-1T and passed LinX three times before I went to sleep, but when I woke the computer was frozen on a blue-screen. Unfortunately, it is going to take me many nights before I find out just which ones I can reduce, because each pass I mentioned of LinX is ~12min - I have it set to prob size 36585. So in the next several nights I will try reducing each one individually and test overnight.

About my graphics OC, at first I found it easy to OC to over 1000MHz GPU and 1200MHz mem. (from the default of 725/1000). That was tested with SoSE. Then I found Kombuster, set for max resolution, which is 1600X1200. When I ran that it almost immediately locked up from skyrocketing heat! What a surprise. I backed off my OC, then discovered "Extreme burning mode" - the "fuzzy donut" thing. That seems like the best GPU torture test. The best I was able to do and stay under 82*C was 1.2V / 900MHz core / 1200MHz mem. But I will back this off to 1.149/850/1100 for the summer. My present temps stayed under 80*C at those settings, and games don't ever stress the GPUs that much either.

Also, I found that Asus SmartDoctor would screw up and boot my GPUs to MAX V, 1.4V! So I ditched that (and GamerOSD), and installed and am now using a much better interface: MSI Afterburner. If you want to use it on yours, ask me bc there are a couple of tricks to use it. Kombuster came with the Afterburner download.

chememan

Cold morning boot leads to BSOD under stress ... ****?   Reboot the (now warm) computer and all is good until I cold boot the system again.  I have now manually set all of the memory settings and the problem is gone, but it was a PITA to track down.  You might be surprised how much (AUTO) variance there is from boot to boot, particularly when the temps are cold, compared to a hot re-boot.  YMMV

This sounds similar to the Asus X58 "cold boot" prob. They would have to try to start the computer many times before it would even post to codes, the PS would just make the fans jump a little bit each time. Hmmm, the similarities here.

Unfortunately, when I tried the Rampage II Extreme, I had exactly the opposite prob - the board would refuse to post when warm. After a 20min cool-off period it would boot fine. And nothing was overheating. So I returned the board for refund, otherwise we would not be having this conversation now, I would be running the Asus mobo - which I liked better BTW. It had 3 USB headers and powered all my FP USB items, the E758 doesn't.

Anyway, maybe Intel or EVGA/Asus was a bit too picky about temps/V on bootup? (rhetorical)

I'll check that out, but is not high on my priority list, may be awhile.

Jay Leno wednesday March 10 | User "Corsair_Mike"

HalloweenWeed

Posted in *Club i7 Stability Continuation*:

rexrzer77

I haven't been back to this place in 4.5 months, so it's good to 
see all the new OC's happening, albeit with some BIOS and
other stuff I am not familiar with...it's all good. 

HalloweenWeed--nice moniker!

I see you've got some RAM in the mix, so good to see that also...
12GB is no easy thing to get stable and fast both. Now get it up
there close to mine and you'll be stylin'. 

Later gents,
rexrzer77 

Yeah, but I've hit a wall at 4GHz. Can't do any faster than 4. Perhaps if I increased CPU past 3.3125Vcore, but it gets too hot then. So the wall may or may not be from temperature limitations, I don't know. But it don't bother me, and my cooler isn't up to it for summer use anyway. I don't plan on leaving it there anyhow, I'm going to clock down to about 177 for permanent use, I shouldn't have to worry about temps or lockups in the long-term at that speed. ATM I am running at 192 still.

 


Hmmm, well I don't quite know where to start because it's been awhile as far as helping people...but  I am up for it if you are...I'd need to see the specs on your ride first, then maybe I'll see some things that I have experience with from months and months of getting my setup 100% stable at higher numbers. I have a notebook just filled with run after run's data, with various RAM and CPU setups, plenty to draw from for most people's set ups. And I *have* worked with your RAM type, had an xlnt set of Dominator C8 RAM that I pushed up to 1697Mhz before hitting a big fat concrete wall, Hah! 


The bottom line is CPU and RAM configuration and ability. I can throw things out there that worked for me, or other people, with similar CPU's and SDRAM types and setups, and if yours isn't capable from a hardware point of view then we are already dead in the water...However I can't know about your setup until I see two things: your complete template, and a couple of setups of yours that have failed at higher Mhz...if I can have you post those things maybe I can help you out. Or if you prefer do it in a PM-- be my guest...it doesn't matter to me either way.  


I always enjoy a challenge, and sometimes I learn things too! 


Later maybe...
rexrzer77 

Nah, rexrzer77, it's all moot bc I was only trying to go higher just for kicks. I am going to downclock for the summer heat anyway, and leave it there. Thanks for the offer anyway. I just thought I would tell you a little of my experience, that I had also hit a wall. I might be able to climb over that wall, but it may require too much V for my cooler. I don't care to upgrade my cooler, I am satisfied with performance at 173-177 Bclock. Now if I have problems with heat during the peak of summer, that will change things. Again, thanks anyway.


Oh, that's a brand new post too jrmitchell1983. GTN. If I have trouble with Vreg this summer, I WILL do that. Thanks.

Intel Core i7-920 stepping D0 lot 3928A567
EVGA E758 SZ2Z
Corsair HX3X12G1600C9 2GBx6 1600 9-9-9-24 1.6V
Dual ASUS Radeon 5850 Xfire
Velociraptor 300GB boot
Corsair 1000HX
CNPS9900LED (air cooled), AS5
CD/DVD DL combo drive Pioneer DVR-S18MBK
SB X-Fi Titanium Fata1ity Pro SB0880 (PCIe x1)
4: WD 500GB Caviar Black 32MB cache in RAID 10
Monitor: Dell 1626HT (21" flat screen CRT)
Kingston HyperX KHX-FAN memory fan
Cooler Master HAF 932 case


if u cant get a stable overcloack with that--i would try to reseat ur ram and cpu and reseat ur cpu cooler(mabe even getting a mugen 2 for 32$;)

U should get 3.6 stable on OC easy with that setup man


try makeing ur memory option to auto(1067 and then higher your cpu to 165-170 and that should bring up ur ram to around 1400mhz--see if that works for now.--if it does work--go from 170 to 175 and so on;)

I don't like this forum any more. Thank you to the few that tried to help me, and to all those who help everyone else. Goodbye.

HalloweenWeed

Well let me clear something up. I am quitting this forum for my own good. I was spending way too much of my time on it, I have OCD tendencies, I do the same thing with my computer games. I get all involved in something, and neglect most other things that I can get away with neglecting, and I need to stop that. It's like an alcoholic quitting drinking. It's not healthy for me to continue to do what I have been doing on this forum. And because I have OCD tendencies, it's an all-or-nothing affair for me. I just have to quit. Again, thanks to all who help ppls.

Dont leave yet, your only 298 posts away from the next level, and many of your posts have been intertaining and helpfull. you also get another BR at the 1000 milestone.

Yes thank you for al the help you provided me HalloweenWeed ;)