Prescott S478 3.4 @ 3,94 problem

[soterman]

Hi everyone,

I recently got hold of a Prescott 3.4 and managed to get it running stable at FSB 232, volts are at 1.538. I can play for hours, do does benchmarks fine and I haven't seen a blue screen yet.

The problem I have is the following: When I try to back my files from my SATA raid to my PATA disk, the pc shuts down immediately. I've never set up the 'shut down my pc when the cpu temp reaches xx degrees' in the BIOS, nor any other option like this. When I go back to the stock speed, keeping the 1.538 volts, I can copy stuff fine. The problem is not temperature related, because I tried my aircon unit blowing directly into the open case, and still the minute I click 'paste' the pc shuts down.

Any ideas? Thanks!

 

[ex_reven]

how did you test your OC for stability?

 

[soterman]

By running Orthos for a day, by playing games for hours, and using memtest for the memory.

 

[ex_reven]

set your computer to show you the bluescreen instead of rebooting

Control Panel>System>advanced settings (off the top of my head its in there)

 

[soterman]

I know what you mean, but my pc isn't rebooting, it's shutting down. No BSOD or whatever.

 

[ex_reven]

Weird. It has to be a heat related problem then unless one of your pieces of hardware is physically dieing. I think that regardless of what you set in bios, if your cpu goes over its temp threshold it will still shut down.

Software related issues are usualy blue screens or just crashes. If you have another hard drive around, try transferring files from your sata to that and then try transferring files from your PATA to that drive. See if that makes it crash. How old are the drives?

I would also have suggested the PSU might be a problem, im not sure on enermax quality, never experienced them before, but a PSU could potentially cause the problem you describe.

 

[soterman]

Could the southbridge be too hot? I mean that's the SATA/PATA controller of the 875 chipset, right?

On second thoughts, you might be right about the PSU. It's rated 500W, and it might be enough (marginally), except when I ask the disks to work hard.

Is there a way to find out how much power the 3.94 Prescott requires?

 

[hat]

1. Reseat cooler with Arctic Silver 5 and clean out dust from ALL components
2. New PSU
3. Overvolt northbridge
4. Use a memory divider (if you want this explained PM me, try 6:5
5. Get a cooler for Northbridge and Southbridge (if southbridge has no cooler, a cheap piece of copper maybe left over from something with some superglue or sticky thermal stuff will do)

Just some ideas

 

[Widjaja]

An option

This could work.

Is this only happening at 3.9Ghz?
Maybe you could reduce the overclock until there is no problem.

Unless the overclock is necessary and you get significant performance increase from it.


Also judging by the amount of hardware i.e HDD's you have in your system it maybe PSU related.
I know the temps would be pretty hot at that O.C as I used to own a Prescott.
So maybe when copying to another HDD for some mysterious reason pushes it over the limit.
I also noticed you have a ABIT motherboard.
When getting my ABIT motherboard work it did some wierd and mysterious things.


But at the end of the day drop the OC until copying to the other HDD works.

 

[levi__]

Sure you've got the AGP/PCI lock setting on?

 

[newtekie1]

I'm going with soterman's guess. I think the RAID controller is unstable because of the overclock. When you raise the bus speed, you are also increase the chipset speed. In my experience the onboard RAID controllers are usually the first to suffer from the instability.

 

[Ketxxx]

XP has some kind of background service (cant remember what its called) where it will shutdown or restart ur comp if it thinks a fatal error has occurred. Disable this.

 

[soterman]

Thanks for the replies guys. Yes, the agp/pci clock was locked, the cpu/memory divider is 1:1 (the memory is rated pc4400), and the northbridge cannot be overvolted (no such setting ).

I spent yesterday afternoon testing and saw it was the combination of 2 things. I used a wattage calculator to see how much power my pc needs in theory and the result was 585 watts - which I don't have. The second thing is that all kinds of 'wonderfull' things happen at 1.535 volts, even with 3 disks disconnected. So, I lowered the Vcore to 1.515 and lowered the FSB to 226 (that's 3.84GHz), run all the tests again, and backed up my stuff successfully.

I think I'll settle for that for the time being. Thanks everyone for your input!

 

[newtekie1]

3.8GHz is still pretty damn good, especially for a socket 478 processor.

 

[Widjaja]

Thought it may have been to do with how high the OC was.

Good to see a problem solved

 

[ex_reven]

3.8GHz is still pretty damn good, especially for a socket 478 processor.

Yeah I'll second that my friend.

 

[Pinchy]

3.8GHz is still pretty damn good, especially for a socket 478 processor.

Lol, not too bad, but i reckon he can do better . My old 478 3.0 got to 4.1 .

Anyways, to let you know...once my overclock stuffed up my whole RAID array. Wouldnt boot until I reverted to stock clocks and rebooted.