@95viper, I have tried both of those things and neither worked... but thank you anyway
And no I don't have anything in any other slots. Only my GTX460 in the PCI-Ex16 slot
And up-ing the voltages does not help? NB, CPU, etc.
Nope, doesn';t help.
Over the last hour or so I've discovered some interesting things.
First of all, using the Gigabyte EasyTune 6, no matter what clock speed my processor is at, it is unable to detect any frequencies higher than what it would take to get 3.4GHz, even if they're set way beyond that. For example:
See how the power on CPU speed (which I set in the BIOS) does not match any of the frequencies listed below it... because all of those frequencies correspond to the 3.4GHz clock I can achieve without losing my ethernet port. There seems to be some invisible forcefield past the 3.4GHz barrier which this board just cannot stand.
I got my CPU to 4GHz without even having to up the voltage to any components whatsoever, including my cheap RAM which had no problem running at almost 900MHz (despite being cheap 800MHz modules) and the best part is I didn't even have to stop there... I just felt no need to keep going as it was an unrealistic fantasy to have an overclock I can't use because I don't have internet. But shit, it's true what they say: these Xeon E3110s overclock like crazayyyyyyy on stock voltage
I guess I will now have a search around for a cheap ethernet card
HOWEVER there is one issue I have... my temps are always the same at idle. 35c Core 1, 34c Core 2
No matter what clock I am at, the core temperatures always stay the same (this is with realtemp) and the ambient temperature never seems to change them either... what's up with that?! HW Monitor is even worse, it reports 20c and 19c for the cores
Is this just because I haven't needed to change the voltage? Whenever I open something like firefox or start to open a program, the CPU usage can go anywhere near 30 or 40% without the temps changing... is that normal? My E6600 idle temps used to increase even with a gentle load of maybe 10% opening a program, hmm
I will also note that I played Crysis for a while very successfully while I was running at 3.8GHz just as a quick test to see if the PCI-E frequency had changed (therefore affecting the GTX460 in the PCI-E slot) but it ran absolutely fine with no issues at all, and this is with PCI-E Frequences set to Auto. I can therefore only assume that despite being set to Auto, it isn't actually overclocking the frequency. My problem must be something much deeper..