First off, hi! New guy here, but I've been reading and using this forum for info for a while.
Anyhow, I've got the regular base model of the M5A97 (I know, I should have sprung for the EVO), but when I installed my video card (HIS IceQX HD6790 Turbo...once again, should have gotten the 6850, considering...) into the blue slot, I had issues with the card not pushing out any blue. It was weird...everything had this strange brownish/orangeish tint. I moved the card to the black slot, and everything's fine...but now finding all this out, this means now that my card is running 4x?
Also, this is my first build since high school (early 00's...). Since then, I was on a submarine, so I had laptops and never really bothered with desktops. I'm having issues overclocking with the UEFI. It's all foreign to me...I've been out for so long. Are there any guides or anything (Google is less than helpful in these kinds of specific inquiries-I just get M5A97 ads and reviews)? I'm really apprehensive about going in there and just changing stuff. I *really* can't afford to let smoke out, since I was only able to afford this build because I had a student loan, and this was my motivation to take on that loan.
I can overclock the balls off of it with AMD Overdrive, but I do know enough to know that software overclocking is useless. Besides, it's wicked unstable and I bluescreen nearly every time I do something like Prime95 or transcode videos in Vuze. The latter is more my idea of an ideal stress test for me, since currently it's just about the only thing I do that stresses this machine that much. Hell, I can declock it to 800MHz and it'll handle all of my light stuff with no issues, and it'll stay at ambient temp then. But, I'm going off on tangents here...