GA-770TA-UD3 The system has experienced boot failures because of overclocking.

[mcole237]

This morning I walked out to my desktop powered off, which was odd because I had left it on the night before.  I boot up my pc and I receive the message:

The system has experienced boot failures because of overclocking.

Last settings in BIOS setup may not coincide with current H/W states.

Current CPU Speed: 17.0 x 200MHz
Current Memory Speed: 1333MHz
Current HT Speed 2000MHz

This is strange because I have not/am not overclocking anything on my system.  I disregard the message just to see if Windows will boot and I can check on a download I had started last night.  It boots windows then the screen goes blank after a minute or two.  I reboot and the same thing happens.  This time when I boot my PC there is no beep and no display.  I remove the side panel and it happens to boot when I apply some upward pressure to my Video Card.  It felt like it was slumping so I propped it up with a plastic bottle.  Now the system will boot with the same message and the monitor will go blank after a few minutes.

I boot in safe mode and it has been running long enough for me to write this message.  What could be the problem?  I figured the Video Card might not be seating right but, the bottle is holding it in place.  Why am I getting the error on boot up is something going on with my BIOS settings?  When I look through my BIOS nothing seems out of place everything is in AUTO and I even try loading fail safe settings.

Thanks ahead of time for the help.  Here are my specs.

Gigabyte GA-770TA-UD3
AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition
HIS HD 5850
4x2GB Kingston Hyper X
1000 watt PSU
1 TB Samsung HD
Liquid cooled CPU and plenty of fans

[Dark Mantis]

Hi and welcome.

From your description of the problem it does sound like the graphics card is having a problem making contact in the PCIE slot. This is an issue that I am surprised doesn't happen more often with the size and weight of a  lot of modern cards. It might be that the slot has become damaged and is now not making a good connection even when the card is supported. Is the GPU liquid cooled as well as the CPU ?

[mcole237]

No the GPU is not liquid cooled but, it has great air flow through the case and I as far as I know my card has an upgraded fan and heat sink straight from HIS, never runs hotter than 45C.  And you are completely right, while my card is no 5 pound ASUS MARS II or 3.5 pound HD 5970, having only the PCI-E slot and two thumb screws holding a 3 pound card completely level seems quite a stretch.  My system seems to be running stable enough at the moment with the Aspirin bottle in between the PSU and VGA.  I have been running MW3 stable for a day or two without the monitor randomly going grey with lines and then into standby.

[Dark Mantis]

Well at least you seem to have found a way to keep it working but it is hardly a professional job using an old aspirin bottle. I think that you need to contact your retailer and sort out a RMA for the motherboard. It is covered for three years from the date of manufacture so I would think that won't be a problem.

Maybe when you get the board back or replaced I would see if you can do a more permanent fix for taking some of the weight off the GPU when it is installed.