About to give up

I’ve now burned through 3 Xeon E5-1660 CPUs and it’s all my fault.

0x9C is always the BSOD. I have tried nearly everything to diagnose it short of increasing the voltage enough to blow the silicon up, which I’m currently doing.

My VTT and System Agent voltages are at 1.35V on both. This is CPU destruction territory in terms of voltages. “Safe” is 1.2V. But NOTHING is stable anymore. Can’t even pass Prime for 2 minutes.

I’m crying because I’m such a failure. I have crippling depression and anxiety and I was supposed to contact Wendell for producing videos, but now I have an no longer working computer.

Have I destroyed another CPU? If I have I deserve all the pain in the world.

Woah, calm down there buddy. We all burn through hardware. I may or may not have destroyed my server running a memtest in a VM. Stupid, I know. I’m just retarded.

If it didn’t work out it didn’t work out. Nothing wrong with that.

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My life for the past year has been pain and anguish and regret. All I had to distract me was making a PC worthy of Linus Tech Tips to hire me and get me out from the darkness. I have failed.

Take it easy bro, pick yourself up and start from scratch. Failure often sparks the greatest opportunities.

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Why the obsession with over-clocking? The E5-1600 is quite a capable CPU at stock speeds. Was the O/C the goal of the videos, or was this just a machine on which to produce the video’s?

If the former - I think a video showing the difficulties and failure to achieve a stable OC could still stand on its own merits. learning from our own, and others peoples failures is only human - it can be entertaining too :slight_smile:

If the later, you really don’t need an OC’ed machine to do great work, and OC’ing a production machine is risky business and best not done. I don’t mess with my hardware that keeps food on the table - but I too learned that the hard way :smiley:

Don’t feel bad, it happens to us all!

Quit feeling sorry for yourself. Man up and take control of your life. If you don’t like the way it’s goin then change it.

EDIT:Sorry if I’ve come off as a bit of a dick, but I mean what I said

That’s exactly what someone would say that would trigger my suicide.

“You’re immature, you’re a baby, and you’re fucking retarded.” is what I’ve been bombarded with on a daily basis. I would have killed myself 1000 times over, but I instead chose self-harm.

Maybe make a blog post instead and vent a bit about your issues, it usually helps. There’s plenty of bros here to give great advice about life in general.

I use r/aspergers for that. And I have been let down by my family who believes I’m retarded and mental illness is a western medicine myth, and a government support system that does nothing to train Aspies that grow past 18. closing on 10 years without proper psychological support.

I hope you find some good advice there, my quick advice is don’t focus too much on the fact that you have aspergers, you’re not a problem that needs to be fixed, you just have to find comfort in yourself.

I seem to now hit a brick wall with the VTT. Prime will instantly freeze at 4.5Ghz with the VTT being the point of failure NO MATTER WHAT VOLTAGE I USE. It NEVER did this before with the previous 2 processors I used. It’s fried beyond repair. I’m a failure.

Edit: OMG IT WAS VCORE. I set it to what is supposed to be the default for a degraded CPU, 1.52V, and it passed Prime95 for longer than it has ever done tonight.

What confused me was that with a Kingston RAM kit, there was a clear distinction between VTT instability and Vcore, cause Vcore was 0x101 BSODs and VTT was a different stop code. With this G.Skill kit, both Vcore and VTT are 0x9C. This got me to increase a few voltages too high AGAIN.

I stuck to the 0.3V difference between the System Agent Voltage and Vcore, and set the System Agent to 1.22V with the VTT at 1.25V.

I will need a new processor to undo my CPU degradation mistake which I’ve now made 3 times…

I don’t use Prime95 anymore.
For my rig when I first built it is was a Linux only rig, I used the stock cooler and a the “press X to overclock” option on startup.
It was rock solid stable
Switched to Win 10 cause Star Wars Battlefront, ran prime95 and all hell broke loose.
Deleting Prime95 fixed all my problems, later went to a manual OC and it took 6 months to find a combo that worked.

It’s not your fault, lots of people buy intel.

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Usually I could care less about people as I’m constantly disappointed by them.

But I’ve been horribly depressed and suicidal, I know that crushing feeling and your mind won’t let you out of it. You may hear it that you have to change the way you think and its true. I use hobbies and things that interest me which require critical thinking like programming or building a racecar. I know some of those hobbies are out of reach for some people but the point is to keep your mind occupied. Once you can ignore irrational thoughts you’ll see the only fix was with yourself.

I still get depressed now and then but i know how to mitigate those feelings and understand that they are temporary and irrational. Helping yourself or seeking professional assistance is far better than living in a twisted reality.

Good luck.

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Tacking on to a lot of good advice already in this thread.

When working on projects, you’re going to fail. What’s important here is to recognize when you’re failing due to the fact that you’ve had failures already. Bob knows I’ve burned enough hardware due to silly mistakes I made simply out of frustration and desperation. It’s important to recognize when you’re getting to this point and just back the hell away. You’re too close, it’s too important. Go do something else and come back in an hour or two.

It’s a problem I’ve seen a lot of people run into in IT over the years. But from those of us with depression, it’s even worse because it can trigger all those feelings of worthlessness. So, some important things to keep in mind.

  1. You’re better than this. You’re just hampered by frustration and depression right now, so right now might not be the best time to continue the project.

  2. When you come back to the project, always remember to use the Rubber Duck method of problem solving.

  3. While it’s good to have people you look up to, the phrase, “worthy of Linus Tech Tips,” is worrisome. It’s no necessarily a give-away that you’ve put someone up on a pedestal, but it’s eerily close. Only you can know for sure. Putting people up on a pedestal gives them waaaay too much power over you. And often times they won’t even know it, so a casual dismissal of your project by them ends up being a crushing rejection to you. Focus on you. Make a blog and/or YouTube channel about the things that interest you, and people with similar interests will follow.

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I know what you meant. Mental illness and disorders like ASD can be pretty havoc inducing, higher in the spectrum most people with ASD are well aware of taking control of their life is the thing they need to do but at the same time many are completely stuck in actually being able to move in that direction for various reasons.

In any case, @FurryJackman your not the only one here :slight_smile:

Keep in mind that failing at things is part of life and failing at something isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and doesnt necessarily make you a failure.

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Don’t care about people’s mental stuff. But as someone who is also not exactly the worlds best silicon-whisperer, here is a bit of advise: Overclock only stuff that you can live without. If you risk losing stuff that actually has a job to do, you are doing it wrong.

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Go to a doctor?

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At the end of the day it is melted sand and doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. Also Intel says to never use Prime 95 and to use mprime instead.

Chill out maybe get an appointment with a shrink and read some School Dayz or something.

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Do whatever make you happy only true meaning to life.

Well, I’m going to stick to these voltages for now and not load AVX loads and see if it holds up.

The rule to Overclocking Sandy Bridge and beyond: DO NOT TOUCH SYSTEM AGENT VOLTAGE until the difference between the Vcore and System Agent is greater than 0.3V.

If raising Vcore stops stabilizing, raise VTT and not system agent. What really confused me was Gigabyte labels System Agent voltage as “IMC” so I thought increasing that resulted in memory stability. NO, that degrades your CPU. VTT is what stabilizes memory frequency.

Thank you for the hat in the other thread, BTW. I’ve had a rough year. But also, no thank you to the trolls that want to trigger me for fun.

Stupid bureaucracy is why I still don’t have help 10 years after I turned 18.