Had to clear CMOS... why?

[somecanadianguy]

I've been running stable at 3.8GHz (turbo off) and RAM at 1200Mhz.
Last night I wanted to do some rendering tests at different speeds so I dropped to 3.5GHz (with turbo) and my RAM was at 1336Mhz.
Everything was fine and I did my testing with no problems.
I went back into BIOS and OC'd 3.8 (turbo on) and RAM at 1086Mhz... using settings that have worked fine before (though I suppose I could have messed up).
Tried to boot... fans and lights came on... then it shut off... then it came back on... then shut off... ect...
Had to shut my surge protector off to get it to stop.
I wasn't exactly sure what to do, but first thing I thought of was to try clearing CMOS.
I did that (took out battery... forgot that my board has a jumper), and it booted just fine.

Can someone explain some reasons why this might have happened?

[sswilson]

Could be any number of things.

My DFI Dark didn't like parallel moves. I couldn't go directly from a multi X FSB of say 3200 to a different multi/FSB combination of 3200 even though each set of settings would work fine if I started at stock and worked my way up.

I always assumed it was some of the hidden settings which needed to start at stock and work their way up in order to be stable at the higher level.

[somecanadianguy]

So is it best to load defaults before loading a saved OC?

[sswilson]

I normally don't have to do that, but it certainly couldn't hurt.

Sometimes when I'm pushing memory I go through that just to be sure, but in most cases, I've found that all of the required "hidden" settings are in the saved profile.

I'm not sure what your experience level is, so please don't be insulted if you already know this.... :) It's also important to keep in mind ambient temperatures this time of year.... don't know how many times I've had an OC that was 100% stable all winter long start going flakey on me in june/july because of it. :)

[enaberif]

Originally Posted by somecanadianguy

So is it best to load defaults before loading a saved OC?

Unless the overclock goes to some weird extreme it doesn't matter.

All you are doing is bumping a few set variables in your bios from the default and shouldn't stop a bios from loading.

[somecanadianguy]

Originally Posted by sswilson

I'm not sure what your experience level is, so please don't be insulted if you already know this.... :) It's also important to keep in mind ambient temperatures this time of year.... don't know how many times I've had an OC that was 100% stable all winter long start going flakey on me in june/july because of it. :)

I'm definately not insulted.
I'm still learning... and a lot of what I have learned came from this site.
Temperature in the room is still about the same as it's been.
Most of my time is spent in a nice, cool basement.

I have no idea what happened then.
It's working fine now, but I am curious why it did what it did.

Thanks, guys.

[sswilson]

Originally Posted by somecanadianguy

I'm definately not insulted.
I'm still learning... and a lot of what I have learned came from this site.
Temperature in the room is still about the same as it's been.
Most of my time is spent in a nice, cool basement.

I have no idea what happened then.
It's working fine now, but I am curious why it did what it did.

Thanks, guys.

That's what I thought as well.... :)

I've been running my computers in "a nice cool basement" for damn near 20 years now, but even though it feels cool in the summer, it's still generally warmer than it is in the winter. We just don't notice because it's cooler than the rest of the house. :)

It's amazing how much a 5c difference will make on component temperatures.

Not a biggie though, just something to keep in mind if you find your OC going for a crap and you can't figure out why. :)

[somecanadianguy]

I appreciate you trying to help, but I really don't think temperature caused the problem.
I keep a digital thermometer sitting close by so I can watch ambient temp.
Actually, it's a couple degrees cooler most of the time now because my gf doesn't run the heater.

[MpG]

My own opinion is that sometimes components are just complete and utter bastards.

I've got something similar going on with my own 920 rig, where I worked right up to 220BCLK, single-step by single-step, on each step running everything through a huge collection of stress tests and benches, before finally advancing things a little further. Then, after I backed off a few step, half the time the thing's giving me no-boots, no matter what I change. My current guess is that some AUTO-setting is using some logic that worked properly when scaling up in speed, but didn't respond properly when decreasing the speed.

If so, you might consider dropping the system peed down, then slowly working your way back up again. Annoying, but it might just work.

[tyreman]

You had for one the gigabyte boot loop