how do you know what causes a crash?

[rth]

My temps are pretty nice now due to cleaning 5 lbs of dust out of my hsf and rerouting stuff inside my case, so I decided to play around a little bit. I put the FSB at 138 with stock mult of 10.5, with ram at 7-3-3-2.5 instead of the 5-2-2-2.0 I usually run. It POSTed fine, got into Windows, and ran Sandra benchmarks fine. Then I loaded up a game and it played fine for awhile, then gave me a bsod saying something about nv4_disp.dll, which is my nvidia graphics driver. How do I figure out what caused my crash? I've seen this ram do over 150 on other systems so surely that's not the problem. Should I lay back my RAM settings even more? I did notice one thing while benchmarking... even at only 138 FSB, my memory bandwidth was higher with those relaxed ram settings than at 133 FSB and 5-2-2-2.0. I was impressed I've got the bug now, I wanna push this puppy, but something is not liking the higher FSB. I would say it's my crappy GF2 video card since it only crashes in game, but I believe this Shuttle an35n locks the agp bus at the stock clock.

So, generally, how do you know if you need higher Vcore, higher ram voltage, more relaxed memory settings, etc etc to get the machine stable?

my stuff:
shuttle an35n ultra 400
palomino 1600+ @ stock clock
micron 256M pc2100 @ 5-2-2-2
antec 300w psu/case
stock cooling atm

[Dputiger]

In asking the question you've nailed a very important point when it comes to OCing. OFten times, you don't know precise causes. Its possible that your board, not the RAM, doesn't like the higher FSB. This could come down to issues between board and RAM, the board itself, voltages, or any other manner of things.

As to understanding when you need voltage, the simple answer is that you add voltage to increase stability when a system is unstable. The trick is learning how much to add, and when.

The fact, however, that your system is de-stabilizing at only a 138 MHz FSB doesn't bode well for future OCing. I'm not sure i'd expect too much.

[originel]

I'm sure you've checked this already and it's not a problem but i gotta ask...what OS and drivers are you using, what video card (exactly), last time you've updated, etc?

Since it seems to be graphics related only my suspicion is that it's the FSB settings and your graphics card not getting along

also that made me just think of another question. has it crashed while not playing a game (even once)? or has it been exclusivley while playing games

[rth]

Ok, I've verified that the AGP and PCI buses are indeed locked independently of the FSB, so we can probably ignore them. I've tried so many settings that I can't remember, but I think the only time it crashed at 138 was while playing the game. I did try 142 and maybe even 145 earlier and one of them crashed while loading Windows. It's starting to sound like a ram issue, and honestly I probably still have the timings set too low for OCing. I'll back them off a little bit more tomorrow and see if that fixes it... if so, we've narrowed it down fairly well Thanks for the help, I'll be back tomorrow, hopefully with good news as I fly through the galaxy at warp speed