Guild Wars 2

Ok let me start out by saying, please don’t respond with “Don’t overclock your CPU/Ram.” The purpose of this thread is to see if anyone has found a stable workaround.

Currently running the following:

i7 930 @ 4.0ghz Oc’d
Asus P6X58D-E
Nvidia Geforce 670gtx
Windows 7 64-bit

With these setting I constantly getting crashes to desktop with the typical generic Guild Wars 2 “Hardware Failure…naughty boy don’t oc, our game don’t like it.” rhetoric. This ONLY happens in game when doing the following:

- Idling at character select screen
- Waypoint travel that requires the loading screen
- Cutscenes

Now I’ve tried mutiple overclocking settings with my BIOS and if so much as go over the stock 2.8ghz, I will get these problems. Also, adjusting the throttling FPS, V-Sync, and graphics in game have no influence. Clean install of graphics drivers as well, running and admin, etc…

I prefer to keep my system OC’d becasue I play other games that also take a huge advantage of it being overclocked. GW2 also benefits a lot. I can be in a full on epic WvW battle with no lag (lowest drop was 30 fps). Stock setting, it’s laggy as hell. Idling in a room I’ve gone upwards to 180fps, stock clock setting 50fps. Yes I know the whole “human eye can only see blah blah blah!” but you see clearly that having an OC’d cpu/ram in this game does not lower performace.

So has anyone with a rig similar to mine been able to find a stable workaround? If you do and it works, I’ll send 1g your way!

Thank you!

I guess some basic questions for you would be:

Have you adjusted the bus voltages to give the CPU and RAM enough power at the higher clock speed? GW2 is pretty intensive on hardware usage, so you may have problems if you don’t get the power settings adjusted properly.

Have you tried extra cooling/higher fan speeds? Just checking because sometimes it’s the little things that trip you up. On my old ATI 4870 graphics card (notorious for running hot) I kept my GPU nice and cool but the voltage regulators were still getting hot and crashing the card. Once I added cooling to the back end of the graphics card, things worked fine. So there may be some small, uncooled chip that’s giving you problems.

Have you looked on overclocking sites? Many of them will review new games and they, or posters on their forums, might have posted stable settings that you can try. Another reason to check dedicated OC sites is that the people/posters there are more likely to know what they’re doing. Posters on a game forum are more likely to be the type who just “try values to see what works” but don’t know the ins and outs of properly overclocking a system.

LoL…

What vcore? What ram? What timings? What ram speed? What ram volts? C’mon man, if you ask for help give us some details…

Assuming the 930 is d0 step?

Sounds more like a bad OC,but i have not alot of exp with ocing intels though,but it sounds like you’re not giving enough volt.

Here is my BIOS settings ( The most stable and cool setup I’ve found so far, but correct me please!):

Ai Overclock Tuner – MANUAL
CPU Ratio Setting – 21.0
Intel® SpeedStep Tech – DISABLED
Xtreme Phase Full Power Mode – ENABLED
BCLK Freq – 191
PCIE Freq – 100
DRAM Freq – DDR3-1531MHZ
UCLK Freq – 3063MHZ
QPI Link Data Rate – AUTO
CPU Voltage Control – MANUAL
CPU Voltage 1.2750
CPU PLL Voltage – 1.80
QPI/DRAM Core Voltage – 1.25
IOH Voltage – 1.10
IOH PCIE Voltage – 1.50
ICH Voltage – 1.10
ICH PCIE Voltage -1.50
DRAM Bus Voltage – 1.60

Load Line Calibration – ENABLED
CPU Differential Amplitude – AUTO
CPU Clock Skew – AUTO
CPU Spread Spectrum – DISABLED
IOH Clock Skew – AUTO
PICE Spread Spectrum – Disabled

I’m running a 750W PSU currently, so power shouldn’t be an issue.

Corsair 2×3gb SDRAM DDR3 160

Corsair H50 water cooling for CPU.

Playing GW2 my CPU temp stays around 40-45c which is pretty low. I have a very good cooling system all around in my case.

I also had the same problem with my old gfx card (geforce gtx 465).

I’ve done numerous searches for this problem and setups similar to mine working with guild wars 2 with no luck!

I would really suggest to go to a proper oc forum to ask questions about getting a stable oc for your cpu. Like www.overclock.net is a really great forum to get proper help in ocing your cpu.I have zero experience with ocing intels,a ton with AMD’s but thats not much of help for you.Really check out the forum there are tons of pages for your cpu.

Forum > Intel > Intel CPU’s, then do a search for OC i7 930.

1: the h50 is crap… Don’t take that the wrong way but it is.
2: c1/2 states disabled?
3: if thats a c0 your going to need 1.4v vcore

Actually stuff it, looking over that last post you clearly need to do some real research on overclocking bro.

Thanks caedmon, but that’s where I got this setup from in the first place :-/. I’ve tried many, and I’m by no means an expert, but it runs my CPU very cool and every game except GW2 stable. No blue screens, nothing.

Valkhar.1850:

Thanks caedmon, but that’s where I got this setup from in the first place :-/. I’ve tried many, and I’m by no means an expert, but it runs my CPU very cool and every game except GW2 stable. No blue screens, nothing.

Oh that sucks mate sorry..It could be that it really just needs some extra juice because i think your CPU Voltage is really to low for the OC yu currently have,meaning it Can be right for some games but in some other games that make extreme use of your cpu like GW it may crash as it does now.You can also try to Underclock your mem to keep it at about the same as factory speed,since you barely notice an fps increase while upping ram speed anyway and it can mess with your oc being stable.It can also be due to LLC.

“Enabling LLC disables vDroop, goes against Intel’s specifications, and allows dangerous voltage spikes when overclocking like this. If it were a really small overclock, then I guess I wouldn’t be worried. Or, if it were a 65nm CPU, then I wouldn’t be worried either because Intel’s 65nm CPUs can handle vDroop being disabled (or in other words, having LLC enabled). "

“This doesn’t mean that the CPU would die after 1-3 years, but it just means that it’s possible that its overclockability could either be reduced or eliminated – depending on the overclock and the voltage used. "

Please have a look at this site about CPU-Differential amplitude http://www.overclock.net/t/746652/cpu-differential-amplitude-bios-setting-and-how-it-helps-i7-oc-stability

and http://www.overclock.net/t/119265/how-to-clock-skew-can-save-your-overclock-and-memory about Clock-Skew

Can’t edit message for some reason… I wanted to copy this last piece about Clock-Skew

“Most overclockers leave clock skew adjustments at their factory default of “Auto.” The problem is that when overclocking at higher frequencies, the auto control does not adjust precisely enough to keep your overclock from crashing, hence a manual setting is often needed. Also, “Auto” cannot compensate sufficiently to resolve some memory compatibility problems."