Im pretty new to this overclocking business still but understand the basics, but this problem i have seems to be beyond me

I have a E8500 on a Striker Extreme 680i Mobo
8GB of Cursial Ballistix PC-6400 4-4-4-12 Ram
2x 8800GTX's In SLI
1100W PSU

I have overclocked my E8500 too 3.8Ghz with a FSB of 1600 with 1.3 VCore, this is Unlinked with my ram which is running at 800Mhz. I have also jacked up the ram timings to 6-6-6-21 to rule out problems with it.

I have ran this setup on prime95 Blend Test for 30 mins with no issue and keeping under 61 degrees under full load.

Voltages:

Ram 2.2V which is the rated voltage for this memory.
Vcore 1.3
CPU VTT 1.4

All of the following are on auto for voltages but are as follows.

NB 1.53
SB 1.52
HT 1.45
LDT Frequency i lowered to 4x from the default 5x to make sure that wasnt a problem.


Even though my from eyes this setup looks fine i still get memory errors in games such as world of warcraft which completely crashes it to windows again.


I did try Linked & Synced since 1600FSB and 800Mhz ram is the same when linked & synced but this actually caused my system to blue screen when playing games.

The only thing i could think of is upping my Vcore to 1.4 to rule that out which i did and still i get memory errors in world of warcraft.


Any suggestions would be much appreciated as im out of ideas.

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On a side note i have had this system running at 1709 FSB 750Mhz ram which is 4053Ghz which gave me errors in prime95 but still i never had memory errors

680i is quirky with memory control, as well as gaps in fsb where it's impossible to stablize the system. Ocers shun it. Downclocking should help.

Yes i have noticed the gaps in the FSB where certain FSB's i set will just not boot where Higher/Lower ones will but ive seen a number of systems at 4Ghz OC on a 680i mobo which is what i really want but will be happy with 3.8.

Is there nothing else you can recommend?

You can bump up chipset voltage, but at this point, it's not recommended, and it's doubtful it'll help. It's just down to a matter of luck with 680i.

Yea i think ill stay away from that as from what ive heard im at the max already. Do you think a 3.5Ghz overclock with the standard 4-4-4-12 timings would be possible? As it seems 3.8 and 4Ghz stable is just not going to happen with the 680i memory controller

Its very strange how certain gaps in the FSB will work fine when some will not.

Try dropping your ram down to 4 gigs. 8 gigs can make things quirky. The real answer is to go to a P35 or later mobo.
also, if you haven't already, you definately should run memtest to rule out a bad ram stick. Crucial has had problems lately.

Its extremely annoying though how it will let me run Prime95 with no errors and something as demanding as 3Dmark06 with out a hitch. But when using something like World of Warcraft i just get wow error messages Do you think it would help reinstalling it? Must be some way around it, i mean if it can run 3Dmark06 which takes 10mins+ but crashes wow in 5mins got to be something that will help other then hardware upgrade.

Did you run small ffts to check cpu stability (10 to 12 hrs minimum), then run blended ffts to check cpu and ram stability (10 hrs).