Guest OCNewb Posted February 2, 2006 Posted February 2, 2006 I think I've just about exausted every possibility concerning my new mother board. My symptoms are that my system will hardlock during normal use, usually doing some kind of graphics activity. Reboot is always required. What accelerated my debug activity was the realization that 3dMark05 will fail and freeze prior to finishing. I have swapped out my graphics card to another box with worse cooling and a worse power supply and it passed 3dMark05 just fine. Swapping in a working graphics card from another computer (a GeForce6800GT) replicated the 3dMark05 failure. Here are some of the things I've tried. 1) Virtually every Nvidia graphics driver 2) The AMD 64 X2 driver + the MS hotfix. I've also tried the /onecpu trick to turn my X2 into a regular single processor. 3) Memtest86 passes after an 11 hour burn in. 4) dual prime passes after 12 hours. 5) Increased memory voltage and chipset voltage to no avail. 6) Observed temperatures and volatages during the 3dMark05 test. Voltages are steady and core GPU temperature maxes out at 71C prior to freezing. 7) Extreme cooling on my CPU keeps it around 23-30C. 8) dual booting a 32 bit OS (windows XP pro). 9) upgraded my BIOS The amps on my 12V rail for my PSU is rated at 34A. The last thing I'll try is to lower clock speeds on my RAM to see if that makes any difference. But if I can't run at stock speeds, then the board has to go. Does anyone else have any other ideas? Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Redbeaver Posted February 2, 2006 Posted February 2, 2006 did u try using the other PCIE VGA slot? did u try using only 1 memory stick and put it on the 2nd from the top? lol 71C ? ur card is toasting in there... did u try lowering the PCI clock from the bios? the 4096 into something smaller? did you change the PCIE clock from 100Mhz? did u check how hot ur chipset can be? did u try to take it off and clean it out and put AS5 or sth similar to it? and last but shouldve been first.... did you use automatic RAM timing? coz if you do, thats ur problem right there. did u try Forceware 83.40 or 82.12? Those works amazing, and im using 83.40 on x64 right now. whats NAM and PCI driver? for 32-bit windows, IDE SWE is a bad idea and can cause problem, but on x64 it works fine. click yes when u install 6.69. did u try BETA BIOS? use the december05 one. good luck. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest OCNewb Posted February 3, 2006 Posted February 3, 2006 did u try using the other PCIE VGA slot? did u try using only 1 memory stick and put it on the 2nd from the top? lol 71C ? ur card is toasting in there... did u try lowering the PCI clock from the bios? the 4096 into something smaller? did you change the PCIE clock from 100Mhz? did u check how hot ur chipset can be? did u try to take it off and clean it out and put AS5 or sth similar to it? and last but shouldve been first.... did you use automatic RAM timing? coz if you do, thats ur problem right there. did u try Forceware 83.40 or 82.12? Those works amazing, and im using 83.40 on x64 right now. whats NAM and PCI driver? for 32-bit windows, IDE SWE is a bad idea and can cause problem, but on x64 it works fine. click yes when u install 6.69. did u try BETA BIOS? use the december05 one. good luck. Thanks so much for your reply. I thought I was a lone voice crying in the wilderness. Ntune reports 39C for the system temperature and my CPU temperature is currently 26.5C. My GPU idles at 45-49C and maxes out at 71C during 3Dmark05. It's lower at 3Dmark06, since that runs like a slideshow on my poor box. I have not tried the 1 stick trick, however I did lower my RAM clock to 1:0.7, which is a clock speed of 143.5MHz, less than a DDR300 memory. At these RAM underclocked settings I could make it through 3Dmark05 with an atrocious score of 3251 and 3Dmark06 with 1364. Since I'm not a hardcore gamer I chose not to watercool my GPU, but now I'm wondering. I think 71C is still well within the spec. however. I have OCZ value RAM, which I had always intended to run at stock speeds, however apparently I can't even achieve that. I did have to modify the RAM settings to the specified 2.5 4 4 8, and increase the voltage slightly to pass memtest, but I wonder if I shouldn't loosen those up a bit. Actually if the problem is really the RAM, maybe I should return the RAM and buy decent RAM that will work with this board. Any recommendations? I didn't try altering any PCI bus clocks, which is an interesting suggestion. Given however that dumbing down the RAM got me through 3Dmark, perhaps I should concentrate on that first. Which RAM timing figure is the most obvious to start relaxing? Oh and as far as the beta drivers, I've tried 82.65, which crashed somewhat less, but had the annoying feature of dying while idling (once the screen saver started doing things). I did not know there was a beta BIOS. Where do you get that? Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
lowboy Posted February 3, 2006 Posted February 3, 2006 If you can return ram do it and buy 2X1gb Gskillpc4000 at newegg$197.00 Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest OCNewb Posted February 3, 2006 Posted February 3, 2006 If you can return ram do it and buy 2X1gb Gskillpc4000 at newegg$197.00 I'm past the 7 day point of getting my money back, but I could RMA it for an equivalent product. I don't care at this point. If it runs like DDR300 RAM I can pass it down to my kids and buy some real RAM. I just have to get this box stable and hopefully overclocked one day. It's primary purpose is to run hardcore floating point simulations and otherwise do development work. Thanks for the suggestion, I'm going to go over to newegg and see what I can get. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest OCNewb Posted February 3, 2006 Posted February 3, 2006 I have no idea why they moved this thread here to the overclock forum. I'm not overclocking my motherboard. In fact I have to underclock it to get it to work! The presumption is that my RAM is underperforming, even though it passes memtest. Funny thing is that I tried to relax the CAS timing to 3.0 and that resulted in a machine that would not post! Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest OCNewb Posted February 8, 2006 Posted February 8, 2006 I got my gskill RAM rated at DDR 500. What a difference this has made! I am actually underclocking my RAM at a base clock of 240 MHz. For the first time I can run the RAM in 1T mode. I have a modest, proven stable overclock of my system at 2.4GHz, although I am slightly underclocking the HTT bus since I'm using the 4x multiplier. I may try to push it towards 2.5 GHz later. I'm just happy my system appears stable so far. No crashes and I can run 3dmark05 just fine. Although my scores are crappy right now. Hopefully some graphics/BIOS settings will fix that. Bottom line, for the DFI Infinity SLI forget trying to use value RAM, you will suffer issues. I suppose I was warned about this, but I thought it was just for overclockers. So in the end I have not RMA'd my board and I'm reasonably happy so far. Now if I can just get my SLI configuration to work as advertised! Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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