Overclock no longer stable, why?

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kuhne

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In my water cooled new build I have a i7 4770k which I managed to first overclock to 4.4 then 4.5 and I saved those two profiles in the bios once I realized they were stable (along with a 4.0 profile and the default 3.5)

I knew 4.5 wasn't completely stable so I stressed it, I played a lot of titanfall and it worked fine, it only rebooted itself when I stressed it with Aida benchmark. The 4.4 overclock worked fine with Aida and temperatures were around 75c max at full load in aida, sometimes less but it never rebooted or blue screened.

I went back to my 4.0 profile and kept installing programs and games, overclocking my gpu, etc. then the next dat I try to run those profiles again and they both blue screen, they don't even get into windows, the best I can do is see the user screen before it blue screens. I'm not sure what's going on, it can't be cpu age as I opened the box just 4 days ago and the oc was working fine yesterday. I could change the thermal paste but I doubt that's the issue as I put the artic silver myself a few days ago.

While on 4.0 the machine is rock solid and with my gpu stressed to the max I can pretty much run every game I throw at it and temps are always fine both for gpu and cpu.

So what could have happened?

CPU shows no visible damage and to be honest it shouldn't have any, the most I gave it was 1.4 voltage and it has a good cooler, as I said I managed to play titanfall at ultra for about an hour with no issues and no overheating, at 4.5.
 
Solution
4Ryan6
Anytime you're overclocking and crashing and rebooting seeking that overclock sweet spot of stability, you can and will corrupt your GPU drivers, even if you think you're stable if you haven't uninstalled and reinstalled the GPU drivers you could still be unstable because of the driver corruption.

In your situation it's difficult to say exactly why not knowing the rest of your specs and exactly how you arrived at your overclock in the first place?

Were there any variables or differences in each overclock, were the overclocks completely done manually?

If so were they done with fixed or offset voltage?

What memory speeds and voltage to the memory were you using?

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4Ryan6

4Ryan6

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Apr 14, 2002
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Anytime you're overclocking and crashing and rebooting seeking that overclock sweet spot of stability, you can and will corrupt your GPU drivers, even if you think you're stable if you haven't uninstalled and reinstalled the GPU drivers you could still be unstable because of the driver corruption.

In your situation it's difficult to say exactly why not knowing the rest of your specs and exactly how you arrived at your overclock in the first place?

Were there any variables or differences in each overclock, were the overclocks completely done manually?

If so were they done with fixed or offset voltage?

What memory speeds and voltage to the memory were you using?

 
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Solution
K

kuhne

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Thanks for the reply, the system specs are

I7 4770k
Titan black
16gb ram (trident 2400)
Msi mobo
600psu gold rated (system was throwing out 350 to 400 watt max at the highest points so that's not really it)

My problem isn't really with the GPU, that one is actually rather stable, if i turn up the agx cooler in my titan black up to 100% I can reach close to 80fps in uningine valley at extreme hd without crashing or throtling.

As for the ram speeds, I tried both overclocks with the speed at 2400 but also 1300, they worked fine both times, I was using an xmp profile.

The way I reached the stable 4.4 oc was with this
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-1722630/intel-god-quick-dirty-guide-4ghz-haswell.html

4.5 was the same but with 1.4 voltage..

Thanks for the gpu tip though, I will try cleaning and reinstalling the drivers.
 
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K

kuhne

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Removed and cleaned gpu driver and other programs I installed, tried oc again and bluescreened, I removed the cpu and it does show a small darkened area, I guess this could be it?
 
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4Ryan6

4Ryan6

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Small darkened area, Where?

Did it show a good thin coverage of the thermal compound footprint?

Your temps are far from burning the CPU, unless something bad is going on under the hood, meaning under the heat spreader?


 
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kuhne

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The thermal paste was fine and as you say, temperatures weren't horrible, only time I saw it touch 90c was after a few minutes of Aida extreme. This was on 4.5 with about 1.45 voltage, which may be too much for a coolermaster seidon 120m. The thing is it as working fine for other tasks, I even gamed for a bit in 4.5 with gpu overclocked up to 1111mhz and everything was so so, it rebooted on me and then I went down to the 4.4 oc and that seemed to be perfectly stable even in Aida extreme it never reached 90 if i remember correctly. But this was just a few minutes long (the stress test)

As for the darkened area, I removed the cpu and looked under it, where the pins are, to see if there was visible damage, it looks fine but one side has just a clear darkened area, not necessarily burned, just a darker patch, like a shadow.

The strange thing is now no overclock is stable, I already tried removing software I installed in case it is a software issue. Not sure what else to do.

Luckily I'm still under the 30 day amazon policy and my new i7 will arrive tomorro, I will try that with 4.4, won't even bother with 4.5 anymore. If it still fails then the issue is not the cpu

 
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K

kuhne

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Hi, it wasnt there before, I think it might have been some damage due to using too much voltage
 
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