fsb overclocking leading to hd death

[the21st]

I recently set my fsb to 190 (xp2500) and it ran perfectly for 3 days.... The 3rd day, when I restarted I received a message saying that an OS file was corrupt and xp couldn't be launched. I was able to somehow format, and things seemed fine again, but later that night, my hard drive started clicking and eventually proved unusable. My question is, was this at all related to the overclocking of the fsb? Can overclocking the fsb lead to actual physical hard drive failure?

Thanks.

 

[Sid59]

yes. if the mobo doesn't have an AGP / PCI lock, the oc could interrupt that frequency and corrupt the hard drive.

what MOBO?

 

[the21st]

Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe... what setting should the agp/pci lock be? and why would this physically affect an ide hard drive? Thanks.

 

[BlueWeasel]

Originally posted by: the21st
Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe... what setting should the agp/pci lock be? and why would this physically affect an ide hard drive? Thanks.

That board has a PCI and AGP lock.

The IDE controller for your drives is part of the PCI subsystem. The speed of the PCI bus is a function of your FSB and the available dividers. However, for all NForce2 board like the A78NX, the AGP is locked to 66Mhz and the PCI is locked at 33Mhz (the default speeds).

However, if there is no AGP/PCI lock, then those speeds are determined by the FSB and the motherboard dividers.

Example, assume your board doesn't have a lock, and it supports 1/4 and 1/5 drivers only. If you are running at 133 FSB, then you would use the 1/4 divider for PCI, as 133*1/4 = 33Mhz. If you run at 166 FSB, then you use the 1/5 divider, so 166*1/5 = 33Mhz.

You always want to stay as close as possible to the 33Mhz default speed. If you took the above board, and tried OC'ing to 200 FSB, then your PCI speed would increase to 200*1/5 = 40 Mhz, since you don't have a 1/6 divider.

The AGP bus speed works the same way, except the dividers are different, and it's default is 66Mhz.

I'm not familar with the Asus board, but there is no setting on my EPox Nforce2...the lock is automatic. You might looking in the BIOS to see if you change the speed of the PCI from Auto to 33Mhz, and vice versa.


It sounds like merely coincidence...since the PCI and AGP speeds are locked on your board, overclocking to 200 FSB shouldn't hurt the hard drive.

 

[the21st]

Thanks a lot for the info!