Hi all,
I am the owner of an Alienware Area 51 x58 desktop from 2009 with intel i7 920 chips.
An APC battery backup recently failed and when it went down it caused the pc to restart several times. During the last restart, when I finally got the PC off the battery (which was making it's warning sound), a message came up during reboot that I have never seen before. It basically said that overclocking had failed and it wanted me to start the machine with the default values. I did so, and I haven't seen any message since.
But now I'm wondering if the factory-set overclocking has been turned off and needs to be turned back on. I have a few questions.
1. Did the Area 51 x58 ship overclocked to 3.2 from 2.67?
2. How do you turn it back on if it has gone off?
I read a very thorough posting on this at the Dell forums that said to turn it back on you needed to hit F2 during startup and then F9. Well I tried hitting F2 and it brought up the boot manager, but there was no F9 option and nothing about overclocking.
I tried to use intel's extreme turning utility, but pretty much everything was grayed out and I didn't understand it anyway.
I have never overclocked or tried to overclock before, so whatever overclocking was on was set by Alienware back in 2009.
Thanks for any help!