Maximum PC

So I have an i7 920 2.66GHz Socket 1366 processor. Many of you are familiar with the build (was one of the first i7 OC's on the forums) and a lot of us worked on it.

She's dead, Jim.

I noticed the other day that my RAM timings were off (7-7-7-18 instead of 7-7-7-24). Normally not a problem, right, but the system has had intermittent stability issues for awhile now. I double-checked OCZ's website for the settings on my OCZ Platinum DDR3 1600MHz RAM, believing that to be the culprit, and changed my CMD Rate to "2" and the voltage to 1.64 and the timings to those on the website.

Then my OC went haywire. I reverted the changes and started from the ground up (saved BIOS profiles). Now, no matter what I do, I'm unstable (fail PRIME95) within the first twenty minutes of my runs. Always on two cores, too.

This is whether or not I'm even using the RAM in the stress test. I just attempted a "Custom" test with 4 Threads (hyper-threading disabled on CPU) and "8" for "Min FFT size." Failed and workers (one) stopped.

The same happens eventually with any of the options for PRIME, and right now I'm at stock clock on the CPU (including voltages, I made a profile of all defaults) and my RAM set at proper timings.

Any clues? I'm not going above 65C on the burn, even.

Oh, and the RAM passes Memtest with no failures.

Well, I've delved deeper into it and reset the multi to 20 for a 4.0GHz overclock. I've upped the voltage to 1.4v (yeah, I know, dirty method to stabilize an OC) and so far so good on Prime. Going to run it for an hour, then start backing off the voltage until I'm at my min-stable.

Current temps are mid-70's.

Let you know.

Update:

I realized I was pretty much being an idiot by trying to railroad a C-step i7 to 4.0GHz again when she just doesn't want to run that. I've set my multi to 19x200 for 3.8GHz and RAM still at 1600MHz with the following changes:

Vcore: 1.3v
QPI/Vrr: 1.355v
IOH: 1.3v (Found it's recommended to up this from stock 1.0v if running power-hungry GPU configurations such as SLI and I'm using a GTX295).

I've also disabled Vdroop, HyperThreading, and Turbo (HT and Turbo were not on during last OC).

Going to see how well she runs here and if I can back down the Vcore voltage further, seeing as "massive" bumps are only really needed to take it from 3.8 to 4GHz. Temperature spread so far is mid-60's during Prime95 burn in (20C better than the 4GHz OC).

Will check back after an hour of PRIME.

Fixed it all and dropped idle temps by 6c and burn by 20c by just not being dumb anymore.


Thanks anyhow all!

Sorry I didn't get in to your thread in time to help but it sounds like you've got it all under control bro.