Hi, I have a X58A-UD3R Rev 1 with the latest non Beta BIOS F6. I purchased one of these Xeon chips because I heard they overclock easily, plus an extra two cores is always nice.
It booted straight up and loaded Windows without any issues, but when I went to overclock it, that's when I ran into a problem.
Where to begin...
Well, I guess I'll start at the beginning. I was following the same overclocking technique to what is used for an i7 930 i.e. isolate bclock from everything else and see how high that can go. So that's what I did, I reduced the multipliers for uncore, QPI, dram and CPU (keeping uncore x2 of DRAM). Failed to post.
Reset CMOS, try again
Then I decided to try to just overclock it to something completely random:
bclock 160, QPI x36 (5760Mhz), uncore x20 (3200), DRAM x10 (1600), CPU x22 (3520 + turbo boost up to 3840), Vcore normal @ 1.225 + DVID +0.075 for a total vcore of 1.3V, DRAM 1.54V 8 9 8 24 timings (the RAM I know works at this speed, I tested it when I was overclocking my previous CPU the i7 930 to 4Ghz).
Well, this worked! I haven't run Prime95 or OCCT for more than 5 minutes each, but I've been using it for a few days and hasn't crashed... I'll run those two at some point if I can't get a better overclock.
So then I started trying various combinations:
bclock 170, DRAM x8 (1360), Uncore x20 (3060), QPI x36 (6120), CPU x22 Turbo on to x24, DRAM 8 9 8 24 @ 1.54V, Vore Normal @ 1.225V, DVID 0.075V (vcore total 1.3V) - no post
Then I tried:
bclock 200, DRAM x8 (1600), Uncore x16 (3200), QPI x36 (7200), CPU x20 Turbo on (but I think that settings doesn't apply in this case, I didn't see turbo kick in for this CPU if you set the multi to anything other than x22), DRAM 8 9 8 24 @ 1.54V, Vore Normal @ 1.225V, DVID 0.075V (vcore of 1.3V) - no post
the next day I tried:
bclock 200, DRAM x8 (1600), Uncore x16 (3200), QPI x36 (7200), CPU x21 Turbo on (but I think that settings doesn't apply in this case, I didn't see turbo kick in for this CPU if you set the multi to anything other than x22), DRAM 8 9 8 24 @ 1.54V, Vcore Normal @ 1.225V, DVID 0.075V (vcore of 1.3V) - no post
It seems I got really lucky with finding a setting that works, but I don't see any logic as to why it works and nothing else does.
I don't have my beeper connected to my motherboard, so I don't have any audio feedback, should probably figure out how to turn that on for some troubleshooting.
Anyway, if someone has a suggestion on what to try next, I'm all ears. I'm out of ideas
.
EDIT: I installed the little Mobo Speaker to listen to error codes. No error codes, it doesn't even get to that point. The motherboard is doing various clicking sounds and goes into a loop but never gets far enough in the post to beep any kind of error code.
