Any Advantage to Increasing PCI-E bus?

[mhouck]

Preface: This came about because I used N-Tune(don't laugh)

Is there any graphical advantage to increasing the PCI-E bus? Ntune clocked it up under the Tune System tab from 2500 MHz to 2925 MHz. Will this hurt my hardware?

Overall my question is: what does this do to my PC?

 

[Sylvanas]

Google this and I'm sure you'll find lots of info .
1. Clocking the pci-e bus too high could *potentially* damage SATA hardware.
2. Clocking the PCI-E bus can improve performance especially on Crossfire/SLI configurations
3. Clocking the PCI-E bus could improve your graphics card maximum OC.
4. 680i (and I assume 780i) chipsets have a feature called 'Linkboost' which, when a compatible Nvidia card is connected the PCI-E bus will be set to 125mhz, it is generally recommended not to go beyond here risking damage.
5. My rule of thumb is don't go beyond 125mhz and you'll be fine.

 

[Rubycon]

125MHz? :shocked:

I haven't messed with it in a while. With the P5WG2WS Pro (975X) I found that 110 was the max safe o/c for my ARC 1280 ML RAID controller. at 115 the controller's event log started showing recoverable cache errors. At 120 it started going critical. :Q 110 was never a problem and the cache transfer rate increased by nearly 200MB/S.

 

[Quiksilver]

"Ntune clocked it up under the Tune System tab from 2500 MHz to 2925 MHz." HUH? Are you sure your reading the right tab or line?

 

[lopri]

NV chipsets have been pretty good at handling high PCI-E clocks. It should be noted that not only the board but also the video card should be capable of handling high PCI-E frequencies. For instance, 7900 GTX will handle high PCI-E speed pretty well, but 6600 GT will not. Intel chipset typically shows signs of trouble once it goes past 110MHz. Granted overclocked PCI-E bus yields little gain, and it's almost useless outside of professional 3DMark scenes. Depending on games, 125~130MHz PCI-E and SLI could boost performance up to 5%. (by my testing on NF4 years back)