Troubleshooting A Fully Updated and Supported Version Of This Guide Is Available At Clunk.org.uk
From time to time, you may get to a point where the PC wont post after you have done a “bad overclock”, and it appears to be either dead, or you just get a black screen . Don’t panic yet! There are a few things you can try.
1. Unplug the PSU at the back. Often, just doing this for a few seconds is enough to let the motherboard reset itself, especially on a board like the P5B, which recovers well from a bad overclock. If that doesn’t work, on to step 2.
2. With the PSU unplugged, locate the CMOS clear jumper (see your manual for this) and move it into the “clear” position and leave it for a few minutes and remove the motherboard battery. While it is clearing, press the on/off switch on the case, this will help to discharge any electricity left in the capacitors on the motherboard. If this doesn’t work, on to step 3.
3. Repeat step 2, this time leave the cmos jumper in the “clear” position for a few hours, overnight if possible and also remove the RAM and make sure the battery is removed. If that doesn’t work, see step 4.
4. Remove the cpu and power on the board, as you would if there was a cpu in there, leave it running for about 30-60 seconds. Reset the cmos again, as mentioned in step 2. Hopefully you should be ok now.
5. If your PC is struggling at moderately low overclocks, make sure that you definately have the RAM set at 1:1. Since writing this guide, a few people have insisted on setting their ram to 800mhz (or whatever it is rated at) to start off with. Obviously this isnt going to work, as, when you start to up the FSB, the RAM speed will also increase and immediately, you will be running the RAM faster than it should go, resulting in an unstable system. If in doubt, set the CPU to 266 and the RAM to 533 and take it from there.
6. If you are having trouble getting stable at the FSB speeds mentioned in the guide, simply try some other speeds. Lets say that your board doesnt like 300FSB, well dont panic, try 310, and keep going until you find somewhere stable. This is normal and all part of finding out how your hardware works. Just keep an eye on the temps
7. If you are experiencing a jerky desktop, slow graphics performance, low framerates etc or any other kind of graphical corruption (this is mainly for Asus boards), load up CPU-Z and in the section that tells you about your motherboard, look at the bottom where it says something like PCI-E Link Width, it may have changed itself to 1x instead of 16x (this happened to me yesterday), so to fix it, go into the bios and cheange the PCI-E frequency from AUTO to 110 (you can try any value up to 110), save and exit, boot into windows and check with CPU-Z that the PCI-E Link Width is now set to 16x. If it is still at 1x, repeat what you just did, but up the PCI-E frequency another notch, check with CPU-Z and if it is back to 16x, go back to the bios and change it back to auto, and hopefully, it should be fine
8. If you are still struggling to get stable, another thing you can try is to swap the RAM into different slots. For example, if your motherboard (P5B) has black and yellow slots, and you have the RAM in the black slots, try the yellow ones. I find that the yellow slots work best for me on the P5B, and the black slots on the P5K, but as they say, Your Mileage May Vary
9. Your Multi is showing as 6x in CPU-Z, when it should be higher (8x, 9x, 10x etc), and your CPU speed is showing as much lower than it should be! - Go into the BIOS and under the advanced CPU settings, disable EIST/SPEEDSTEP. You should have already done this if you have followed the guide
10. On the P5K -
If you have a separate PCI RAID card, and are experiencing problems with drive detection, try disabling legacy USB.
11. Your PC2-8500 RAM (DDR2-1066) is showing as PC2-6400 (DDR2-800). This is because there is no
JEDEC (Joint Electron Device Engineering Council) spec for PC2-8500, so the manufacturers use the highest existing spec for DDR2, which is PC2-6400. All this means is that you will have to manually set a divider if you want to run your RAM at PC2-8500 / DDR2-1066 (see the guide for more info on dividers).
12. CoreTemp fails to load when using Vista x64 - Reboot your PC and when it starts to reboot, press F8, and disable "
Driver Signing Enforcement". When you get to windows, CoreTemp should now load up without any problems. This may work for other programs as well.