Need help on dead computer

[Ho72]

So, I concluded that when you push to the very edge of an overclock, you have NO safety factor at all.

Even when you have a safety margin it can vanish overnight. I ran a mildly overclocked 3770K from November of 2012 — January 2022. It worked flawlessly right up until the day it didn't.

 

[jfriend00]

So, I concluded that when you push to the very edge of an overclock, you have NO safety factor at all.

Even when you have a safety margin it can vanish overnight. I ran a mildly overclocked 3770K from November of 2012 — January 2022. It worked flawlessly right up until the day it didn't.

Funny you mention a 3770k as I still have one of those running with a mild overclock. I've lost track of how old it is. I have turned the overclock down a couple times to stabilize.

The other thing I learned is that I pretty much can't tell the difference between a conservative overclock and a pushed overclock unless I run some benchmark. In normal use, the difference is not perceptible to me at all. So ... for what I do that benefits from a fast computer (graphics/photography work) pushing an overclock is simply not worth it to me. I probably won't even bother overclocking the CPU in my next build and will stick to the XMP profiles for the DRAM.

 

[kciuk aka Ken60]

The other thing I learned is that I pretty much can't tell the difference between a conservative overclock and a pushed overclock unless I run some benchmark. In normal use, the difference is not perceptible to me at all. So ... for what I do that benefits from a fast computer (graphics/photography work) pushing an overclock is simply not worth it to me.

Don't you just love it when sensible reality triumphs over measurebating, and the real everyday use of the technology regains its truth.

 

[pixseal]

This is what I know (or not):

• I don't know why the computer locked-up during and after the stress. I suspect that overclocking caused the initial crashes.
• I was unable to boot from a thumb drive or a DVD
• The BIOS recognized all of my drives, including the USB thumb drive and the DVD drive
• I didn't lose any data, since I never kept data on the system drive. I was able to remove my data drives and copy the data to my old computer
• I swapped PSUs between my old and new computers; both PSUs worked with both motherboards.

I decided to reinstall the OS, but widows told me that it could not install on my NVMe Drive.... until I deleted all of the partitions. I turned off all overclocking in the BIOS. Windows 10 installed successfully and even recognized my activation key (without me typing it in)! I reconnected my data drives and Windows did a "fix" on the drive that was active during the crash(es). Data drives are all good. ...now I look forward to many hours of installing and customizing my software.

Many thanks for your help and suggestions.

--
-Dave
https://pixseal.com

 

[Jeeter001]

This is what I know (or not):

• I don't know why the computer locked-up during and after the stress. I suspect that overclocking caused the initial crashes.
• I was unable to boot from a thumb drive or a DVD
• The BIOS recognized all of my drives, including the USB thumb drive and the DVD drive
• I didn't lose any data, since I never kept data on the system drive. I was able to remove my data drives and copy the data to my old computer
• I swapped PSUs between my old and new computers; both PSUs worked with both motherboards.

I decided to reinstall the OS, but widows told me that it could not install on my NVMe Drive.... until I deleted all of the partitions. I turned off all overclocking in the BIOS. Windows 10 installed successfully and even recognized my activation key (without me typing it in)! I reconnected my data drives and Windows did a "fix" on the drive that was active during the crash(es). Data drives are all good. ...now I look forward to many hours of installing and customizing my software.

Many thanks for your help and suggestions.

Glad you got it back up and running!

A recommend for future is to have a bootable USB with disk utilities like Macrium Reflect and/or Minitools Partition Manager (or if you have another computer when one crashes, build it then). The Windows tools are not very diagnostic, descriptive, nor flexible. Having a bootable USB with these utilities can most times better tell you what's wrong with your disks or OS install (and if your bootup has even progressed to checking for media). They also have a variety of fix-it utilities.

If re-installing/fixing your OS install is what fixed your problem, then you experienced OS file corruption of some sort. I think this can happen if for example, if the computer seizes up in the middle of write operations. With overclocking you have to pay attention to temperatures, hence the hard core hobbyists running their LED glowing water cooling systems. If CPU is a bottleneck (like gaming and video/image processing) you have to balance the cost of extra ventilation against the cost of a faster processor that gives the performance you need at spec.