So I got a GIGANTIC Noctua air cooler for my aging i5 750 CPU and two GIGANTIC Arctic Accelero air coolers for my aging crossfired HD 6770 GPUs thinking that if I OC'd the hell out of them I could get another year before I
have to upgrade my hardware.
This screenshot should tell you pretty much everything you need to know;
http://i.imgur.com/EdqVqe0.jpg
Using 2011's Tomb Raider and Bioshock Infinite as benchmarks (Highest settings) I got a 30% FPS boost with these settings and I'm running 30 degrees cooler to boot!
Trouble is, my machine keeps randomly locking up and/or shutting down. It'll run Prime95 for over an hour without so much as a peep and the Thermal Margin never dipping below 70F, but if I just let it sit, it will fail. . . Eventually. Sometimes it takes half an hour, sometimes it takes 2 days, but after X amount of time I'll find the computer either on but completely locked up, or off completely. If it's off then I get a warning beep when I start it back up and a screen that tells me the computer was automatically shut down in response to a "thermal event."
Thermal Event!! My GPU's are idling at barely 100F, and just barely kiss 130F running Furmark over and over and over again. The CPU idles with a Thermal margin in the mid 150'sF and an hour of Prime95 brings that down to 70F. (LOVE that Noctua air block, btw!
![:) :)]()
)
My point, I suppose, is that this is very difficult for me to troubleshoot. I zeroed in on these settings very carefully and conservatively, and between Prime95 and Furmark I thought I had it nailed down. But these random sometimes-lock-ups and sometimes-shut-downs that occur anywhere from 30 to several thousand minutes apart are making it tough for me to tell what exactly I've got wrong and need to change. If the damn thing would just refuse to post or fail to boot, then fine, at least I'd know to undo what I just tried, but when it runs fine for 36 hours. . .
I suspect the culprit is my vtt, (this Bios calls it "uncore") because Intel specifically says not to exceed 1.21v with this chip, but with this 2-ton chunk of copper bolted to the CPU I figured I had a little wiggle room with that number. I also bumped my core voltage up a few times after the first few freezes hoping that would stop these incidents from happening. It was originally at 1.475v when I found my "stable" OC. Has this 0.0375v increase helped? Not helped?
Anyway, looking at that screen, does anyone more knowledgeable than I see something obviously out of whack that I should focus on? Any tips for nailing this down?
Thanks for any help or advice!
Specs:
Mobo: Intel DP55WG
CPU: Intel i5 750
GPU: 2x Radeon HD 6770
RAM: 8Gb (4x2Gb) 1600MHz DDR3 9-9-9-24
Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit