7700K Fails Diagnostic Test Low CPU Frequency

[MMaes]

Hi, I am hoping someone can help me with an issue I am having with 5 out of 13 machines we have with 7700K processors. All of our machines were recently formatted and had windows 10 installed. When that was done some of the machines suddenly are running very slow (0.79Ghz). The speed was verified through CPU-Z, Task Manager, and The Intel Porcessor Diagnostics tool.

Hardware;

Asus ROG Maximus VIII Hero Mobo (Bios 3201)

64GB G.Skill TridentZ Ram

Corsair Hydro H100i V2 water cooler

Intel I7-7700K

Nvidia GTX1080

I'm really stumped with this one so any help is greatly appreciated. (I was going to attached full test results but couldn't get it to work)

Mike

[n_scott_pearson]

Were any BIOS upgrades also included in these operations? Were any changes made in the BIOS configuration? We regularly see problem reports where it turns out that the BIOS is response for the performance limitations.

Food for thought,

...S

[MMaes]

Hi Scott,

Thanks for the input. No BIOS changes were made. Basically, we had perfectly working windows 7 machines that we formatted from a Windows 10 USB. While we were formatting it kept failing to load windows because it said the CPU was too slow (it showed it running at 0.79GHz).

As a test I can compare every screen of the BIOS from a working computer to the non working ones just to see.

Thanks again.

Mike

[MMaes]

UPDATE: I compared the BIOS from the good working machines to the non working machines and the only difference I see is the CPU Core/Cache Voltage is at 0.704V on the bad ones and 1.232V on the good ones. I'm not sure how this would have changed or where to look for this though.

[n_scott_pearson]

I would have to say that this is a BIOS bug (Asus may beg to differ). It is power-starving the processor. I have now heard of it happening on both Asus and MSI boards. In the other reports, the folks had to manually set the voltage. I would talk to Asus before you did this however...

Hope this helps,

...S

[MMaes]

Hi Scott,

Thanks again for the reply. I seemed to have stumbled upon the fix for my problem. While going through the Asus AI Suite 3 (software for overclocking) I found a setting that is described as being used for extreme CPU tuning. When you hover over this setting it gives a short description of the feature and as a warning it stated that using the setting could result in an under powered CPU. Anyway, I reset the bios and AI Suite back to default setting and restarted my machine. Upon restart the clock speeds were set to the stock Intel speeds.

Long story short I believe the auto overclocking coupled with the Extreme tuning resulted in my problem.

Thank you for taking the time help along the way.

Mike

[n_scott_pearson]

That's good to know Mike. I wonder if the folks with MSI boards have been running something similar and this has been causing their voltage problems as well.

Using this as an educational moment - and understand that I am trying to pick on you Mike - details like this should be mentioned right at the beginning of the discussion. The message for other folks reading this conversation is that, if you don't tell us all the facts, it makes solving issues that much harder and, in most case, lengthens the process considerably.

Down off my soapbox,

...S