One of the few annoyances I've seen with ASUS motherboards is their temperamental attitude towards even minor electrical disturbances. Some factor of their design makes it so that improper shutdowns, blackouts, or brownouts can somewhat easily result in loss of the CMOS settings. This results in a troublesome little error indicating that an overclock has failed! Given that few people who experience this are actually overclocking, and that it doesn't really say what went wrong or how to fix it, this can be really frustrating! Luckily, a fix for it is actually pretty quick and easy.

On our systems, we include the ability to restore the (Puget defined) CMOS settings on any ASUS motherboard that supports the ASUS O.C. Profile feature. This extremely handy feature will allow a user to save multiple profile configurations for their CMOS and restore them later. The idea behind this feature is that a user can keep both default and overclocked settings recorded without having to resort to pen and paper. It is designed so that it even keeps the settings when all other CMOS settings are lost. The only downside is that O.C. Profiles don't carry over during a CMOS flash BIOS upgrade. As such, one must manually record settings for such a situation and put them back in manually (making sure to save a new OC profile afterwards).

So what do you do when your motherboard tells you that your overclock has failed? First, ask yourself if you were overclocking. If so, congratulations! Your overclock wasn't stable - adjust your settings. If not, whoa! Press F1 to go into setup!

You'll start off at the screen shown above. From here, you're going to use the right arrow button to get to the Tools menu.

Underneath the Tools menu, you'll see an option called ASUS O.C. Profile. Go down to that and press enter.

Oddly enough, selecting that will give you the ASUS O.C. Profile options. There are quite a few things you can do here and some useful information, but what want to pay attention to are the profile listings. It should list a name for the first profile. Note in the image above, we have 7-20-2010 as the profile name. If there's a name, you have a profile saved! You can load this to restore it. If not, it's possible your profile was accidentally cleared or it was never created. Underneath this pile of options and information, we'll want to go down to Load from: [Blank]. Press enter and it will give you a list of profiles to choose from.

In this list, if you're using a Puget System, you'll want to choose Profile 1 in most circumstances. If your system was ordered with factory overclocking, then those settings should be saved to Profile 2. Press enter and you should be good to go. Let's just save and exit. You can do this by pressing F10 and choosing OK. If for some reason, you'd rather go through the Exit menu, you can do that too. Just press escape to get back to the Tools menu. Then press the right arrow to get to the Exit menu.

From here, highlight “Exit & Save Changes”, and press enter. You'll get a prompt to choose OK. Your system will restart and everything should be done!

Notice that you may still get a warning about your system not starting correctly last time. This is normal. Just choose to start normally and the message won't pop up the next time you boot. Finally, it's possible you have an older ASUS motherboard that uses a different version of this. In those instances, most of the steps will be the same, but there will be some obvious differences. It's always just a matter of choosing to load the first profile in the OC Profile screen.