random BSODs, screen freezes

[ivanwakeup]

just an update-

i reapplied thermal paste more conservatively and my temps are much cooler because of it. I was at about 36-38C idle before, now i'm at about 30-31C! didn't realize paste application could make such a difference.

however, we'll have to see if my problem persists. The CPU is roughly 2 years old now, and i've been running it at 4.5ghz since I built the pc. is it possible that the overclock has just become unstable @ 1.33V? either way, i'm dialed down to stock clocks for now.

my voltages are currently set to auto, although i've updated my RAM settings so now i'm running @ 1600mhz 1.5V

 

[essenbe]

OK, that's good. And to your question, yes it's quite possible. As I stated before, over time components wear and get to where they just don't operate like they did when new. Adjustments have to be made. For your 4.5 overclock, can you tell me what changes you made in BIOS?
Also, very good job on the thermal paste. It is critical how much is applied. When you put a small bit on it and think 'that can't possibly be enough', it's usually just the right amount.

Also, when you set it back to stock settings did you set optimized defaults in BIOS?

 

[ivanwakeup]

yes, i've set everything back to their default values in my BIOS. To overclock originally, I had simply changed my CPU multiplier from the original 33 value to 45, hence the 4.5Ghz oc. I upped the voltage in small increments until the system would boot and then ran P95 for ~1 hr and monitored temperatures. I can't remember exactly what values I had settled on, but everything seemed to be relatively stable at the time.

I left pretty much all of the other settings default--looking back, it seems like it may have been a good idea to disable the features like intel turbo boost (although I don't know if that affected anything). I'm pretty sure I did have most of the power saving features disabled as well.

 

[essenbe]

Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge are designed to where you are only overclocking the turbo boost. If you think about it, it makes sense to do that. If, for example you need 1.3V for a 4.5 OC, why would you want to pump 1.3V through your CPU and create a lot of unnecessary heat, just to idle on your desktop and read email or shop on Amazon? With the turbo boost and Intel speed step, when the CPU is not in heavy use, it downclocks itself to 1.6GHz and Vcore drops to around 1.0V roughly. When you start up a CPU demanding application, the CPU jumps up to the 4.5 GHz. That is the way they were designed to work and they work very well like that. You can turn much of that off, but it is really sort of hard to do.