Overclocked, Mobo crashed, now how to restore BIOS back?

[hogwell]

I had been using this setup for a week or so, then did the EZ overclocking.

Things worked for awhile, then a bluescreen in Windows.

Now, only the Splash screen and "Hit DEL to Enter BIOS"

I finally got in (after a LONG wait at the splash screen).

I chose, "Load optimized defaults" under Tools and rebooted.

Power on again and I'm stuck at the Splash screen again.

How do I set this up with the most conservative settings to see if it will run at all.

Could the overclocking have damaged the hardware permanently?

[Deepcuts]

To me it looks like your SSD/HDD is at fault here.
You can try creating a Live USB with the linux distro of your choice, on another machine and see if the machine boots. Unplug the SSD/HDD 1st.

[Arne_Saknussemm]

Have you cleared CMOS? p 1-10 of the manual.

[hogwell]

Thanks for the good suggestions.

I had to leave for the weekend and left the computer on while I was gone.

When I returned, the system had booted and was working fine!

At this point, it looks like two things were going on...

1. The EZ Overclocking somehow was unstable and crashed the system.

2. Rebooting should have worked to reset back to default settings, but an external USB backup HDD was plugged in and the BIOS was waiting to boot on that for a LONG time before it gave up and booted the SSD.

So things are working fine now, and I'll be happy just to run my 8700K at default settings, which is fast enough...

[Arne_Saknussemm]

Hmm shame the auto-clocking didn't work...I have to say I 'd recommend doing it yourself in the BIOS...but sure enough the CPU is plenty fast at stock!

If you do try again sometime just unplug everything but the basics and have a jumper cap handy for clearing CMOS. Reboot sometimes doesn't clear things unless you can get into BIOS to set F5 defaults.

Glad it's up and running now!