Issue after upgrading BIOS and ME

[TickleMeElmo]

RESOLVED:

After throwing up my arms in despair and thinking that I had degraded my CPU I contacted Intel to initiate a warranty claim (I bought the overclocking warranty they offer). However sorhol's post stating that him switching the clockgen filter rate to AUTO solved his issues got me to thinking.

Up to this point I have always had it set to "ENABLED." I can only assume that with this setting it either goes to 10uF or 20uF depending on whatever thresholds were programmed into the BIOS/ME. I systematically tried all of the settings and found the 20uF was the only one that gave me stability.

So, if you are having your machine lock up on the windows boot screen it may behoove you to check the "clockgen filter" setting and play around with it.


I was on 3101 before and I upgraded the BIOS to 3404 and the ME to 8.1.10.1286 and now my previously stable over clock is unusable.

However it is not unconditionally unstable, it is unstable only upon first boot. It will proceed to the Windows 8 start screen and the spinning orb thing will get stuck. I can then reset it and upon reloading the UEFI it gives the "Overlocking failed" warning. If I use the same settings again it will without fail be able to enter Windows and pass stability testing. However, equally without fail it will always get stuck upon first boot.

Settings were:

Multi: 47

Vcore : Offset + .05
LLC: High

VCCSA: 1.15
VTT: 1.15

PLL: 1.85
PCH: 1.1

In fact it will fail to boot with anything over a 44 multiplier. Does anyone have any input?

I have a feeling it could be that my CPU has degraded and that it just happened to occur when I updated my BIOS and ME.

Upon further testing it will boot fine with:

-0.005 VCore with 44x
0.050 VCore with 45x

fails to boot upon first try with both 47x and 46x. I tried also to use the manual voltage adjustment and it won't get through the boot screen even with 1.42V with a 46x multiplier. Tried flashing to a previous BIOS and it is suffering the same issue, not sure if it is due to the ME upgrade.

[Nodens]

It's for the clock generator filter and the value is the capacitance in microfarad (μF also commonly written as uF).

[TickleMeElmo]

Nodens wrote:
It's for the clock generator filter and the value is the capacitance in microfarad (μF also commonly written as uF).

I figured that much but I don't know what it actually does. I don't know why higher capacitance would lead to a more stable overclock at higher multipliers. I see in Raja's overlcocking guide it suggests that 166MHz strap be coupled with the 20uF, I have a feeling that the higher multipliers put more stress but I'm not an electrical engineer by any stretch of the imagination and cannot really think of why a higher capacitance would lead to greater stability in this respect.

I would hazard to guess that Auto chooses and option from the set {Disabled,10uF,20uF}; Enabled would logically map to either 10uF OR 20uF. I have a feeling that when set to Auto previously it defaulted to 20uF which may help with higher multipliers while it now defaults to 10uF.

It has also seemed to fix my blue screen issues. On the 3xxx BIOS before I would get blue screens donig things like Handbrake encodes or FLAC transcodes. However this has seemed to fix it. Perhaps of more useful note, before my machine would lock up with a WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT BSOD when I had 1.43V for a 47 multiplier while now with 1.40V it no longer gives these errors.

[HalloweenWeed]

Wonderful TickleMeElmo, I think you just may have ID'd a parameter that has been causing ppl probs W/the latest BIOS(es). This just may give me the confidence to actually pull that "CAP converter" trigger and update to the newest. What's more, I think other ppl who are having trouble W/3xxx BIOS should try this - except those just having trouble W/disks & arrays. Now if I just had some time to do this...

[Nodens]

HalloweenWeed wrote:
Wonderful TickleMeElmo, I think you just may have ID'd a parameter that has been causing ppl probs W/the latest BIOS(es). This just may give me the confidence to actually pull that "CAP converter" trigger and update to the newest. What's more, I think other ppl who are having trouble W/3xxx BIOS should try this - except those just having trouble W/disks & arrays.

This is an excellent idea! If the default thresholds for auto setting were changed it could cause stability issues for a lot of people!

[sorhol]

HI TickleMeEdmo,
For me it did not work with 10UF, but was working with "Auto". I have not tried any of the other settings. As said the reason for me picking 10UF was Rajas guide said it should by used for higher RAM speeds.

[Storval]

TickleMeEdmo,

So which setting are you using now the 20uf? or Auto?

[TickleMeElmo]

Storval wrote:
TickleMeEdmo,

So which setting are you using now the 20uf? or Auto?

The only one that works for me with higher multipliers is 20uF; 10uF locks up. My hypothesis is that in previous BIOS's the AUTO generally set it to 20 uF but in recent BIOS's AUTO has been setting it to 10uF.

[Storval]

Ok thats what I thought, got a little confused on which one you were actually using, glad you got it worked out. Going to flash mine this weekend wanted to make sure I had it right 🙂