4coredual-VSTA not locking pci/pcie busses

[phial]

Alrighty, I have purchased the above motherboard and a e4300 to go with it. I am currently running at 2.4ghz @ 266fsb prime95 stable (separate instance of prime running on each core). Ive had the core up to 2.7ghz, but my PC then bluescreens giving an error in one of the ATI driver files.

I have ddr1 pc3500 ram (217mhz cas2 rated)
a x800xtpe
sata raptor 74gig hdd.


I think I have found out why I cant get above 2.4ghz stable, even with my ram set the 266mhz divider. Supposedly when you set the bios to CPU, PCIE, Async , its supposed to lock the pci and pcie busses at whatever you set them to. You dont want to overclock either of these, as it offers no performance increase, and increases instability. Unfortunately my video card has little tolerance when overclocking the PCIE bus, and thus my PC locks.

This board seems to use a divider for the pci/pcie bus , but does not lock them. So it doesnt matter if I have the bios set to CPU, PCIE, Async or CPU, PCIE, Sync, the result is exactly the same. By the time I reach a FSB of 290, the pci bus is at 37mhz~ and the pcie bus is at 107~ mhz. My video card is known to not like having the pcie bus overclocked, and I have seen another person over at the ncix forums have the exact same problem, with the same card. He also confirmed that his pcie bus was being overclocked , even if he set it the bios to CPU, PCIE, Async. I have tried putting everythign to stock, then CPU, PCIE, Async, and manually adjusting pci/pcie separately, but it simply doesnt work. I have tried pretty much all the bios revisions that support my CPU, and they are all the same.

So why would they put a setting in bios to lock or unlock the pci/pcie bus if it doesnt actually work? Marketing tactic to sell the board? Anyone know of a fix?

 

[Mr Vain]

Originally posted by: phial
Alrighty, I have purchased the above motherboard and a e4300 to go with it. I am currently running at 2.4ghz @ 266fsb prime95 stable (separate instance of prime running on each core). Ive had the core up to 2.7ghz, but my PC then bluescreens giving an error in one of the ATI driver files.

I have ddr1 pc3500 ram (217mhz cas2 rated)
a x800xtpe
sata raptor 74gig hdd.


I think I have found out why I cant get above 2.4ghz stable, even with my ram set the 266mhz divider. Supposedly when you set the bios to CPU, PCIE, Async , its supposed to lock the pci and pcie busses at whatever you set them to. You dont want to overclock either of these, as it offers no performance increase, and increases instability. Unfortunately my video card has little tolerance when overclocking the PCIE bus, and thus my PC locks.

This board seems to use a divider for the pci/pcie bus , but does not lock them. So it doesnt matter if I have the bios set to CPU, PCIE, Async or CPU, PCIE, Sync, the result is exactly the same. By the time I reach a FSB of 290, the pci bus is at 37mhz~ and the pcie bus is at 107~ mhz. My video card is known to not like having the pcie bus overclocked, and I have seen another person over at the ncix forums have the exact same problem, with the same card. He also confirmed that his pcie bus was being overclocked , even if he set it the bios to CPU, PCIE, Async. I have tried putting everythign to stock, then CPU, PCIE, Async, and manually adjusting pci/pcie separately, but it simply doesnt work. I have tried pretty much all the bios revisions that support my CPU, and they are all the same.

So why would they put a setting in bios to lock or unlock the pci/pcie bus if it doesnt actually work? Marketing tactic to sell the board? Anyone know of a fix?

Have you read through the 775Dual-VSTA and the 4CoreDual-VSTA threads ?
I'm sure that I have read about this issue before in these threads.

http://forums.anandtech.com/me...id=29&threadid=1896616

http://forums.anandtech.com/me...eyword1=4coredual-vsta

 

[phial]

I just read both of them (well, not all 76 pages of the 775dual-VSTA thread but I skimmed it and searched for anything related to raising the PCIE bus). Ther wasnt anything related, but thanks for trying.


Just to clarify my problem is that when I set it to CPU, PCIE, Async, and overclock to 290mhz, the PCIE bus is at 107ish (which my video card doenst like, and blue screens), I then go into the bios and manually set the PCIE bus to 90 (the setting is enabled because its set to be async), but when I boot back into windows its still at 107 (i cant remember the exact frequency but its close to 107). So in short, the manual setting for the PCIE bus does nothing. Does that make sense?

BTW in your overclocking guide you state:

>>PCIE Frequency(MHz)
-Set to: 117-120
-Info: You can set your PCIe bus speed here. It really doesn't have any effect on your PCIe devices unless you set the value too high or too low.
-Note: Only modify the PCIe speed if you do not have a PCIe card, as modifying the PCIe speed will damage your PCIe card.


It doenst seem to make sense to me, because as soon as you overclock it automatically "modifies" the PCIE frequency. 117-120mhz is highly "modified" above normal. I think it would be more accurate to say that you shouldnt overclock the PCIE bus, because some cards do not tolerate anything other than a few mhz higher than stock, which is 100mhz. Thats exactly the point of this thread, is that the board is raising my PCIE bus along with the FSB, no matter if I have it set to Sync or Async, or whether I manually adjust the PCIE setting to 90mhz to try to keep as close to 100 as possible. Due to the fact that the setting does nothing at all , its causing my pcie x800xtpe to become unstable (and they are known for not tolerating barely any change to the PCIE frequency).

edit: Can you please tell me where I can see waht the PCIE frequency is with hwinfo32?