having trouble overclocking E5200 with GA-EG31M-S2(rev.1.0)

Hi this is my first thread so plz understand my misbehavior if any

So I came back home from Iraq excited to see my new parts and build my first DIY desktop and it went all good and suceeded to post first try.

But there was a problem afterward.

Every time I tried to overclock the CPU, even 10MHz FSB differance, it wouldn't post.

After messing with the bios and running cpu-z and stuff, I found out my memory's clock speed being recognized 400Mhz instead of it's rated 800 on cpu-z.

And in the BIOS, on VGA robust something(sorry) setup, it would say 'not guaranteed VGA graphics card will work properly.' and, if I set performance enhancement to 'turbo' or 'extreme', it would say 'system may not work properly.' (I tried to overclock with each 'standard, turbo, extreme mode.)

It's my first time overclocking and I surely did quite lots of research and ended up with Pentium Dual Core E5200 and the mATX Gigabyte GA-EG31M-S2.

And I've seen more than a couple of reviews that says they were able to overclock with the same setup with no problem.

I think I set all the power saving features disabled, made sure memory clock speed stays under the rated spec. and set PCI latency to 100MHz.

Here goes my desktop spec.

CPU: Pentium Dual Core E5200
CPU HSF: ThermalTake Blueorb II (plus Arctic Silver 5)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-EG31m-S2 rev. 1.0
Memory: G.skill 4G(2Gx2) PC6400 DDR2 800 Dual Channel Kit.
VGA: Sapphire Radeon HD4830
Sound Card: Sound Blaster XtremeGamer
PSU: Antec Earthwatt 500W
Case: ThermalTake Lanbox Lite
OS: Windows XP pro 64bit

I was expecting to overclock it at least to 3.0GHz, and totally disappointed. I think it might be compatibility issue of the memory and the mother board. I shouldn't have gone with G.skill when it wasn't on the mother board supported memory list(not that they list all of them that's compatible.)

Would youguys plz help me out? I've got 18 days and have to go back out there. I really hope I can ship this computer overclocked before then.

Thank you for reading this.

Happy holiday season!!

Hi there. As for memory speed: 400mhz = DDR 800 so your memory is running at correct speed. I hear that running your memory at speeds lower than spec is actually worse than higher than spec where stability is concerned, but thats other peoples words so i cant guarantee its true Anyway you should keep your ram speed as close to 800 as possible by changing fsbram ratio if needed. My e5200 was flying right from the start so i have no clue why yours wouldnt do the same. I hope someone with that motherboard can and will help you out. Good luck!

Default memory speed for e5200 is 400MHZ. You can raise it to 800MHZ.
You may not be able to overclock well, because of that motherboard being µATX.

HOWTO: Overclock C2Q (Quads) and C2D (Duals) - Guide v1.6.1

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ [...] uals-guide

I have the exact same board (well Rev. 2.0) and processor but am having similar problems with overclocking. Now I have managed some overclocking but I can only move from 200FSB to 240FSB. However no matter what I do with the voltages I can not get past 240FSB.

If you want to know the trick to getting any overclock to work you have to take the CPU voltage off AUTO for any overclock to work. I am running 240FSB with the CPU at 3.0Ghz at standard voltage the trick is you go from the normal setting and manually change it to the normal 1.25volts instead.

At 240FSB change your RAM multiplier from 4 to 3.33 to maintain 800mhz, manually set the PCI-e to 100mhz and leave the performance enhancement at Standard.

Try plugging a drive into the IDE bus (NOT A SATA DRIVE). for me i couldn't get more than 9mhz overclock, but then when i plugged a HDD in to the MB (NOT SATA HDD, the old regular ATA type) it worked and i could overclock. I've currently got 40mhz overclock on the bus, 440mhz CPU overclock

I've also limited my PCI to 100mhz and am using auto voltages. I also disabled the support for legacy storage devices.