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Bombchu

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(sorry for the message length)

Hello. I am new to performance hardware and I just recently built my first gaming machine. I guess I'll start with my rig. I'm not really sure what info you guys need, so if I leave something out let me know.

MB: MSI 760GMA-P34 FX
CPU: AMD FX 6300 6 core @ 3.5ghz
GPU: MSI R9 270X Hawk
RAM: 8gb DDR3
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit Service Pack 1

Ok, so I got it all put together about a week ago, and started up Skyrim with everything turned all the way up. Ran great. Felt like a consistant 50-60 fps at all times. Over the last few days I've thrown on a few mods that made the performance drop, so I thought I'd look into overclocking. My cpu specs say 3.5ghz (4.1ghz turbo). I take that to mean that it can go up to 4.1ghz safely. And everything I read about my gpu says that it's built for overclocking. It even has that afterburner software that lets you slide some levers to easily do so. The biggest danger that I gathered from what I read, is overheating, so today I installed a couple more case fans. I ran my cpu through the overclock testing that's built into the catalyst control center, and I let it test up to 4.1ghz, and the temp never went above 42. I turned it down to 4.0 to keep from pushing it to what I presumed to be it's advertised limit. I used the afterburner sliders to turn my gpu core clock all the way up to 1400 and the memory up to about 1700. I threw the hardware monitor up on my second monitor along with a little app called speedfan (basically just a hardware monitor), just to make sure the temps I was seeing were correct. I booted up Skyrim with some tasty mods. and I could tell immediately from the animated loading screen that the game's fps was very unstable. And before the game could finish loading I got a blue screen crash. I immediately rebooted and turned off all overclocking, and turned off all Skrim mods, restoring it to what before was a steady 50-60 fps state. But when the game loaded, the performance was terrible. the framerate was well below 30 fps, and there was awful input lag. I double and triple checked that I had restored all overclock settings back to default and turned off all mods, and I hadn't forgotten anything. All settings were exactly the same as they were when I first played, but the game ran just awful. I guess I should note that I haven't noticed any issues outside of the game in case that's helpful.

So, did I damage something? Would a fresh driver reinstall fix this? Maybe a windows reinstall? Any ideas at all about what I could do to fix the situation?

Thank you for your help!
smile.gif
 
What PSU do you have in your system?
High ripple on the 12v rail in the PSU can degrade your CPU your RAM and your video card, which means its going to run slower and more unstable.
 
Is this only happening in Skyrim but no other games? I would try a fresh reinstall of the game to make certain none of the mod files are interacting with the game even though they are disabled.

Aside from that, what PSU do you have? Instant red flag that you're trying to overclock and not factoring that in your hardware list. You have to make sure it has enough juice on the +12V to handle the extra power you're asking for with an overclock. Did you bump the voltage settings when you did this overclock on either the CPU or GPU? It's never wise to just pick a random overclock and run it, you attempted a massive overclock on the graphics card.. You have to go in small increments one piece of hardware at a time and stress test your system (Prime95 or Aida64 for CPU and perhaps Heaven GPU benchmark while monitoring your temps in HWmonitor or similar). It also doesn't sound like you stress tested these overclocks and checked the temperatures but rather looked at your temps nearly idle, catalyst is not putting heavy stress & duration on the hardware to test those overclocks . You may very well have some damaged hardware here. Rule out that Skyrim isn't the issue and we can try to narrow it down.
 
It is your board, it isnt meant for overclocking. + your VRM system doesn't have a heatsink. causing your CPU to throttle under load.
Try to place a fan over the MOSFET's and OC without voltage adjusment and see how far you can take it.
Overvolting is not really an option on those boards.
 
Yes I came into this thread and immediately thought that board is a bad choice for the CPU at stock speeds let alone overclocking.

As for the stability issue at stock speeds now, it could be a problem with the board throttling stuff but it could also be that some Skyrim files were corrupted when things were loading and the BSOD happened. Best to wipe the Skyrim files clean and reinstall the game from scratch.
 
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