[Alexander1138]

Hello all, first time posting here although I've spent more time lurking on OCN that I care to admit. I've been getting to messin around with my computer lately, and just recently got some advice to overclock my i7 920 bloomfield beyond stock 2.6 ghz. I had always been apprehensive about cpu overclocking as it seemed pretty tricky with marginal room for error. But I did some research and found a really helpful guide on here for 920's and 930's and thought I would soon be overclocking up to at least 3.5 or so. But when I get into the bios/cell menu, most settings (including base clock, ratio multiplier and almost every voltage option) were either straight up grayed out and unavailable or white but wouldn't let me adjust the values. Other settings on the cell menu that I didn't immediately recognize with were available to change, so I was a bit frustrated after I couldn't start overclocking.

I did some research and it seemed like most people with the same problem either had not accessed the menus with the right key, or had some kind of ai setting turned on so manual settings could not be applied. My bios did not have some ai feature to configure this setting, seems like its an older bios or something. After hours of trying to find an answer it seemed that a bios flash might get it to correctly work, but I have no experience with this and was told that there is a possibility of breaking the bios or something through this process.

My question to yall is, should I flash my bios to solve this problem and if not, what are some possible steps to troubleshoot this dilemma? I would like to be able to go higher than 2.6 since I just got a antec 920 cooler for my i7, and temps max on load around 50c after 6+ hours of games.

PS sorry for long text and possibly posting this in the wrong section

 

[b3machi7ke]

Do you have the OC switches turned on? Not sure if you can use the BIOS to overclock if the board has those switches turned on. I've never used them on my board, but it's slightly different than yours. That would be my first thought though...

::edit:: of course, there's always this possibility... http://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?topic=119577.0

 

[Alexander1138]

Switching the 3 overclock switches worked, except I still cannot change vcore, It moves straight over it. This seemed like a problem because at 4.0 (190x21 i7 920 DO) my temps went into mid 90's with an antec 920 cooler with the voltage at 1.4. Is there a way to edit this value because the guide I followed said to have vcore at around 1.25ish. Is it also possible that hyperthreading is the cause of my temps? Really like to be able to overclock since I'm pretty sure my 2.6 cpu is throttling my new 7970

 

[b3machi7ke]

hmm...x58m should only have two overclock switches on it, not three...and yes, I'm pretty sure if you have turbo boost enabled you cannot change the voltage. I might be mixing up my terms, I need to look over the manual again. But at least on mine, there is an option that if you have it enabled it will not allow you to adjust voltage and I'm pretty sure it's turbo boost...