Am i retarded or does the motherboard just have a poor design?

[Haggan]

Hello there. I apologize if this is under the wrong section but here is my story. Every 2-3 years i buy a new pc and i always OC it to see how far i can push it then go down to a moderate frequenzy and enjoy my pc until the performance gets outdated and get me a new one etc.

 

This time a week ago or so i invested in a new pc. I was lucky and got a really good i5 playing around with it trying to get it 100% stable with prime95 at 4.5ghz! but after a few hours of tweaking i realized it wouldnt work since it was jumping up close to a 100c. So i gave up and settled for a moderate frequency 4.2 ghz for that cpu would be no match at all with a vcore of only 1.38

 

So i was running prime95 and closely watching the core temps seeing them run at about 80-90 while having a semi warm room temparature 23+. So it seemed all fine since all i wanted it to be is 100% stable in prime95 for a few hours and then it will pretty much only be used for gaming and that hardly makes it go past 65-75c (atleast in wow)

 

Now, There is so many ways to prevent a cpu from overheating. warning beeps and automatic downclocks and whatnot. But apparently after only 15minutes or so the pc shut off. I felt the heatsinks around the MB ( i guess its something like voltregulators and stuff that feeds the cpu with power below them ) and they were BURNING HOT. I tested all the parts one by one on a friends identical computer and the conclusion came down to the MB. Now it just doesnt react when trying to power up. You can see the fans moving one inch and nothing else happens.

 

Now i oc

[My_Inner_Fred]

Seems like your MB was fried... the motherboard probably wasn't made for overclocking? What is your I5's stock speed? Did you overclock it with a stock cooler? 4.5Ghz seems like a pretty crazy overclock on air... if it was on your stock Heatsink that would have gave you crazy temps, hence you said u where getting close to 100C.

 

I am going to sleep now so Ill check on this tomorrow.

[Haggan]

Thanks for your quick reply. its a i5 750 @ 2.6 ghz stock So i was pretty amazed by my results comparing to different guides and others clock speeds.

But yeah at 4.5 i was carefully checking temps to make sure they would never reach 100c. Just turned prime 95 off and adjusted voltage and tried for a bit and just gave up. But it was running fine with games and other stuff at that speed. I am was using corsair h50 water based cooler with "push-pull" with corsair + antec fans running at max rpm. And for the rest of the case (cooler master storm scout) i had a total of 6 case fans running max speed.

 

I would only run prime95 for a few seconds until the temps was getting too high (checking temps with core64 or something like that)

 

so i went down to 4.2 and dropped the vcore to 1.38125 and it was running fine in prime for 15min and then bam the MB died..

 

The motherboard is not really any fancy model of some sort. its pretty cheap was like 130 euro. But all i was really thinking is why should i spend 200

[potatochobit]

keep in mind, if your CPU temp was 80 then the motherboard itself was likely quite a bit higher, over 100.

 

now, using the h50 to cool 80 degree temps is just plain silly. its not gonna work and it was not meant to do that.

 

also, that gigabyte board is not the best, however, it is not a bad motherboard either

 

5ghz overclock can be done, but that is freaking high. this motherboard clearly broke because you did not have proper cooling.

 

hopefully you did not damage your CPU

 

go ahead and try to RMA the motherboard, if they refuse it will just cost u shipping

 

you also need a water cooling setup if you plan to try this again

[My_Inner_Fred]

Agreed 4.5ghz on air on a stock Heatsink is crazy you CPU will be crapped out dead if that continues. Water cooling is required for higher overclocks and low temperatures.

[joel.monteiro]

if u want to oc so high i would go for water cooling and ur mobo is not meant to overclock to 4ghz u should be able to get like 3.5 to 3.8 with a high end one like ud4p or ud6 ud5 etc u should Oc to 4ghz max on air

Edited February 25, 2010 by joel.monteiro

[XxHellxRaizerxX]

Same symptoms my board showed when i burned out the VRMs. Try an RMA

[Haggan]

okay ok. so what do you suggest me to do? i like the board and the more pricy ones comes with better VRM/northbridge heatsinks but not by a big margin (looks like they only added a heatpipe). So is there anything else they improved on those boards? Because i was thinking if i get this one replaced or repaired on RMA i would invest in some better VRM aftermarket heatsinks. I would really like to run it with 4.2 ~ for gaming since wow is really cpu demanding and you notice a big difference when ocing. i wouldnt really mind running the cpu at 4.2ghz because i dont really see any problem with the cpu being 60-70c when playing the most cpu demanding games or would even that be too high? in that case why?

[potatochobit]

60-80 would be the limit on how hot your CPU should get

 

the problem is, if your motherboard did NOT burst into flames, it would have kept on getting hotter

 

so you were no where near running safe. it just took longer for you to notice due to the H50 water cooling since it takes a few mins to boil.

 

gigabyte boards are great. I use one myself. I think there is a UD4P? this has SATA3. I would get that one for future proofing.

 

running wow at 4ghz is overkill. if you want to go higher, sure, but like we said before u are going to need watercooling and the price is probably not worth it to most people.

[Haggan]

well. i would obviously not let it get hotter. Wow doesnt nearly put as much pressure as prime anyway. I was actually playing wow for a few days in 4.4ghz at 1.360 volt and it was running perfectly fine ! without getting warm at all. So thats not an issue at all. I can always tweak it to suit my needs. Yes wow at those high clock speeds might be overkill. But im playing 1920x1200 @ 8x multisample everything on ultra. This gives me about 40-60 dalaran fps for those who knows whatever that means (on a busy server with lots of people ). It's not like dalaran matters too much but i wanna be able to run it as smooth as possible and be able to fraps in wow and Mw2.

 

Gonna see how it goes with my RMA and what they will do about it. I might consider getting the GA-P55A-UD4 if they let me trade in my old board.. Looks like the difference between them is firewire and one more heatsink + a heatpipe and SLI-ready+CF instea of only CF as far as i can see so far. 50~ euro more. Well hoping for the best on my RMA

 

Thanks for all the input so far, guess i really learned a lesson. If i get the same board back repaired i will pay really close attention and bring it to a 100% safe speed and have my thermal gun ready.

 

I guess the worst part is. Which probably will make me look like an idiot is that a buddy has the near identical setup and was @ my place and he was running prime95 before me at around 4ghz or something and his board died before mine. So we thought it was the psu that have failed since he has an "ACE RAW DEAL 620w" crap. So i took his processor to my board (since he has the good cpu with low voltage needs i was talking about) and i did the exact same thing as him. Fried my board the very same day.. God! Never knew what was going wrong until i killed my board and checked the heatsinks

[Boinker]

Honest to god if you take a better look at the Heat-sinks that come with the board it seems that the people that designed it were more interested in good looks rather then sufficient cooling. Its not like they will not do there job at factory speeds but it looks like unless you have a 300+ CFM air in and out case they will not be efficient for crap When overclocking.

 

May be a good idea to look into a solution from EVGA, MSI or Asus.

 

Btw: whatever board you end up with check the manufacture website and you can find a temperature monitor that they make for the main board, Normally.

Edited February 26, 2010 by boinker

[dr_bowtie]

Boinker makes a point....

 

 

good overclocking means you need additional cooling...not only CPU but board cooling...it is a well known fact that you need to cool the mosfets and vrms on the board or they will die...I always do