Overclocking under Vista sucks?

I'm not in the same situation because I'm using 32 bit vista business not 64 bit. I had heard some reports of OCing difficulty but when I installed Vista I had to make no changes and I am still Orthos stable.

Most of what I've read suggested that people were not as stable as they thought they were.

Well, that doesn't make much sense since you were previously using a 64 bit OS. It's not like Vista would be using some part of your CPU that the other OS left alone. It was starting to make sense in my head until I re-read your post and read the part about XP-64.

I'm assuming you're not using some sort of software tool for overclocking.

It's because it doesn't. Overclocking is related to hardware, and if you're able to do it in a stable fashion, it should be able to run whatever software you throw at it. I doubt that the OS change would expose any instability that has always been there, particularly if it was thoroughly tested in the first place.

You did not explain is this a Vista upgrade from XP or a Vista add on dual boot since your going from 64 to 32bit or a straight all out new installation of Vista32???

It its an upgrade..., as your mechanic would say, there's your problem. A fresh install or dual boot install should work fine otherwise.

Your XP64 was likely not completely stable even if Orthos ran fine. I can run Orthos fine at 3.6 - 3.7Ghz but from time to time a game or app will exit to the desktop or freeze anyways randomly. If I back down to 3.5Ghz or lower there are no issues.

I have done the opposite. I have XP32bit and installed Vista64bit (dual boot) and have encountered no issues related to overclocking.

I would argue that its definitely your OC not being 100% stable.

This not an upgrade. Im duel booting both. Like i said ive had Windows XP-65 running for over 6 months. Ive done orthos and looped 3dmark for over 24 hours on many occasions.

And i play games 4-5 hours per day. Never had a crash. So it definetly seems stable.

But anyways when i went to install Vista, it would bluescreen righter after the files were loaded off the dvd, so right before the gui loads up for the installation.

So i finally backed it all the way down to 2.4 and it installed fine. So after the install i ramped it back up to 2.8 (400mhz fsb) and it blue screened during bootup. I ramp it back down to 2.4 everything runs smooth.

i do not think oc is all related to hardware. Let's sit back think for a sec. How do you you oc when you oc. do you use hardware , software or both when you oc.

Vista SHouldnt have anything to do whatsoever with your overclock.. Mine is the same on vista and XP.

One thing i did though when i installed my 2nd OS in my dualboot setup, i couldnt figure out why it was unstable.. finally i figured it out, i had the XP Swapfile and Vista Swapfile set to the same partition. Big NONO.

I wanna go with "hardware". How do you overclock the system with software (excluding gfx)? Particularly OS? (PS. I don't think we can consider BIOS software in the true sense of the word). Correct me if I'm wrong.

I doubt that makes a difference, like i said i was at 400mhz fsb (2.8ghz) and it still bluescreened. This is with 2 different brands of ram i tested.

I tested with with corsair pc6400 and mushkin 6400. Same results. And 6400 is meant to run at 400mhz speeds, correct?

Now on the otherhand, it is possible that it is using different memory addresses in the internal cpu cache, that would make sense why its unstable in vista, but rock solid in xp.

Vista is far less tolerant of overclocking I have experienced this myself . As I OC in Vista I get to a point were my memory starts giving an increasing number of hard faults. If I continue Vista BSOD. You can see the information from the resource monitor. Vista apparently is not as tolerant XP for memory errors. If you can keep your ram stable I doubt you would have a problem.

There should not be any differnce what-so-ever. Think about how vista is litterally XP done again.

To go back to ByDesign's comment, I think I heard that Vista is more aggressive with memory usage than XP is, as in it will use all of the physical memory with "pre-loading" stuff (whatever the correct term is. Contrary to the popular belief it is not the OS footprint, it is other stuff used to speed the system up was the point), so I guess I could see how you could get errors if your RAM is faulty at times you woulldn't in XP if XP didn't use the RAM as aggressively. But you should have identified RAM problems if your system was as rock solid as you claimed - after all, RAM stability is a huge component of system stability.

Also, when i run the cpu at stock speed (1.86ghz @ 266mhz fsb) and run the ram asynchronously @ 800mhz, vista boots up fine.

No. Im overclocking through the bios.

I can get Vista to run @ 2.8 stable only if i run the voltage at 1.5v.

It runs perfectly stable under XP @ 1.375v.

Both 64bit.


Its possible theres a settign in the bios that i am missing that can help, but im not seein it.

Ok here comes a farfetched theory maybe, but could it be that some versions of VISTA (after updates?) have a microcode patch in it like the one for C2D's recently released by MS. This might explain some people having problems OC-ing, while others do not. Maybe some kind of CPU/memory type dependancy caused by a fix in memory handling or 32/64 bit fixes? I could just be my over-active imagination though . Any thoughts??

If you PC reverts back to stock without a hard drive, then it's obviously not Vista. You don't need a hard drive to boot into BIOS, so if an overclock can't stay stable or go very high and reverts, then it's not the OS, it's either the overclock is unstable, there's a BIOS problem, or a hardware problem.

You can unplug XP and Vista, OC your rig, then just go back into BIOS. If you can't do that, then it's definitely not the OS, it's one of those other things.

I can go into BIOS, set a high OC, save and reboot back into BIOS and all is fine, even with all hard drives unplugged.

First guess would be some BIOS setting is wrong.
Second guess would be unstable overclock (voltages, ratio, whatever)
Third guess would be bad PSU, bad mobo, or bad RAM.
Fourth guess would be corrupt BIOS.