680i LT & Q6600; slight OC and now hangs at boot

[patrick2851]

Q6600, 680i LT SLI, Ultra X-pro 750W power, 2 sticks: OCZ vista upgrade edition PC6400 800 Mhz (total of 4096Mb), 2 XFX GeForce 8600 GT XXX 256Mb in SLI, Zalman CNPS9700LED CPU Fan, 3 120mm fans, NZXT Nemesis case, XP Pro SP2

Installed, working almost perfectly, running very cool, would occasionally hang at post or explorer would fail to load at windows start, but otherwise perfect. Just put together yesterday.

Loaded ntune - using that I pushed from 267x9 to 290x9, so 2.4 to 2.6ghz. Applied, everything seemed fine. Rebooted, hung at 680i LT logo screen. Rebooted few more times, same. Reset BIOS with jumpers, popped battery. Now won't boot past the Main Processor description (CPU post) - theres no RAM post or anything after the CPU.

Tried booting with each ram stick individiually, no luck. All three lights on mobo are lit, all fans fire up and continue. USB keyboard lights up, but system hangs before DEL or ESC can be hit (although the choice does appear on the screen)

very occasionally the room light will flicker when I hit the power button, it is surge protected but could that be a small short? Could it be the power supply?

:help: Please HELP! :help:

EDIT:
I'm a noob, so bear with me - the CPU posts, but it hangs there, nothing after "Main Processor". No RAM post... Should this be an RMA?

[patrick2851]

so it sat overnight last night after I had taken out and individually reseated each memory stick in all possible DIMM slot combinations. I had absolutely no luck last night. Today I turned on just for giggles and lo and behold it booted.

Got right into bios and changed the voltage to 2.0V from 1.9

it rebooted and loaded windows fine. Now im SCARED TO TURN IT OFF LOL

What could cause the problem? Why did ntune facilitate the issue? I will never use ntune again btw, just want to make sure its safe to OC from the bios before I do ANYTHING... Now I'm just happy to see the xp symbol and windows desktop!! (never thought Id say that!)

Any ideas on the room light flicker? should I look into RMAing the psu?

[werty316]

First off I would advise not to use nTune for overclocking. nVidia has an overclocking .pdf file for their 680i boards which can be fewed here: http://www.nvidia.com/docs/CP/45121/nforce_680i_sli_overclocking.pdf

I'm not 100% sure on this but your system instability could be cause by an unstable overclock.

[srpeters18]

When you OC in nTune, if you just move the slider, it will also overclock the memory. So you were overclocking your memory at the same time while using 4 sticks and not enough voltage. Stick with the BIOS and you should be fine. And if you run into the same problem again, pull the battery out and let it sit for a couple hours with no juice, should reset CMOS completely.

[patrick2851]

Thanks so much for the advice guys! it did boot okay a couple of times, then boom it hung at CPU post again, same thing now several times later.

This time it was completely unOCed, only BIOS change was memory voltage 1.9-2.0

Could my RAM be bad? I got this stuff for overclocking but man I'd rather just have a working PC at this point

EDIT:

Any chance this could be some minor short in the PSU or something? When I turn the unit on it does make a very fast high-pitched sound and the room light flickers. This is regardless of the room, and no other appliance we've used in these sockets does it, so I'm guessing not the house wiring. It is definitely in a quality surge protector.

[srpeters18]

Check your specs for the RAM I think most of the OCZ uses 2.1-2.2v.

[scaven92]

The computer draws the most power on turn on, you probably just have alot of load on that circuit in the house, thus your lights are dimming. Same thing happens when I turn my vacuum on. If you are testing other appliances to see if they do this make sure it's something with a large inductive load, like a fridge or motor. Those pull high transient current. My chest freezer pulls ~20amps on startup.

Your surge protector only protects you from spikes in the incoming voltage levels by regulating anything outside of the normal tolerances. This doesn't affect the load your appliances/devices are putting on your household circuit.

As for the whining in the PSU, it probably is just your fan. Sometimes the bearing makes some funny noise when its powering up to full speed, hits a bad mode.

[patrick2851]

Thanks so much for all the advice everyone! :icon_tiphat:

With the voltage at 2.1 and updated the bios with the iso. Hasn't hung since. And now I'm not stressing about the light dimming....

Just bought Crysis :yes: