Mpitts - a mystery for you (and everyone else too!)

[ForceTen]

MPitts,

Here's one for you to noodle over. Put it in the category of too much of a good thing can be bad....

Remember about two weeks ago we were discussing the problems that I was having WRT running Half-Life on the following system:

The Important Stuff
Celeron 566 @ 850 (1.8v)
Alpha PEP66 heat Sink w/GlobalWin fan
Abit Slotket
Abit BE6-II Mobo
256Mb RAM
GeForce II MX (Isn't this a great card for the $$$?)
Non-related to the question at hand
(But worth bragging about!)
20GB IBM Deskstar
MX300 sound
MAG Innovision 800V monitor (19")
Logitech Trackman Marble Wheel
Belkin 525VA USB UPS


If you recall,
In my initial o/c to 850MHz, I had to go to 1.65v to post, 1.7v to boot Win98, and 1.75v for stability in Win98. I was having stability problems with H-L, and also some bad mouse lag (in H-L). Last night, while fuming after another lock-up (that nothing would undo, other than forcing the computer off and starting a new boot), I decided that the frustration of the lock-ups were worth the risk of putting a little too much BenFranklinJuice to the chip. So up go the volts! 1.85v was the first stop on the route, and then back to game playing. 5 minutes in, I get a server parse error and am kicked out of the game that I was playing. Trying to jump back in I got yet another lock up. Frustration! I rebooted, and upped the volts to 1.9v. Heck, I had plenty of cooling. So I get back in and this time when I fired up H-L, I would click on a button in the game (at the start screen) and the game would lock (I could CTRL+ALT+DEL out of it tho). So I said to myself "Well, something is seriously f*cked with this game, I'll reload it. Reboot (again: 1.9v) and this time the system would not post. So I said to myself "This is too much for a stinking game" and set my voltage back to 1.7v. Guess what....

Perfect stability in H-L. Go fricken figure. I shut the damn thing down after 2 hours of play without so much as a quiver. I feel constipated.

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ForceTen

Tough times demand tough talk!

[This message has been edited by ForceTen (edited October 12, 2000).]

[mpitts]

I have read a number of articles about Half-Life and overclocking. HL has a hard time with an OC'ed PC and locks up HARD.

I have an Athlon running at 1Ghz that will run RC5, SETI, Prime95 and infinite Quake3 loops for as long as I want, but it always locks up in HL. Go figure.

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"Everyone knows the best bands are affiliated with Satan."

[ForceTen]

Originally posted by mpitts:
I have read a number of articles about Half-Life and overclocking.

The ironic thing is two-fold: worked fine on an o/c'd 450 cel, and works good now. Just damn. Can you point me to any of those articles?



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ForceTen

Tough times demand tough talk!

[mpitts]

Originally posted by ForceTen:
The ironic thing is two-fold: worked fine on an o/c'd 450 cel, and works good now. Just damn. Can you point me to any of those articles?

Let me see if I can dig them up. It has been a while.



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"Everyone knows the best bands are affiliated with Satan."

[mpitts]

Originally posted by ForceTen:
The ironic thing is two-fold: worked fine on an o/c'd 450 cel, and works good now. Just damn. Can you point me to any of those articles?

This is the only one I could find really quickly:

http://www.3dspotlight.net/tweaks/half-life/index.shtml



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"Everyone knows the best bands are affiliated with Satan."