IDE bus more sensitive than SATA?

[natto fire]

Hi all,
I recently had my SATA boot drive fail due to power surges, had to switch to a PATA drive that came from my XBOX, and noticed that I cannot O/C as much. I was able to hit 180-190 FSB with my Seagate barracuda 7200.7 no problem. That drive took a crap on me when my PSU failed (an Antec true 330 because of very dirty power). I had to switch to backup PATA (Seagte ST310014ACE from my Xbox). I notice I could not hit above 176 FSB.

System is as follows:
AXP 2500+
Asus A7N8X
2x Corsair 3200 XMS (512MB)
Asus 9600XT
Sony CD-RW

Ever since I have installed the PATA drive, I have not been able to exceed 175 FSB. I would not be able to boot to O/S which I assumed was because of the HDD. Because with the SATA drive I was ble to hit 185 flawlessly. Now it won't even load O/S above 175. While the PATA drive is ATA 100, I was shocked to find out I could not get eh O/C results I used to get (2.1 GHz on a fairly old Barton 2500+) I was wondering if there where any BIOS settings I could change to get better O/C results with this mobo/CPU combo. I am almost sure it is the IDE bus that is holding me back at this point, I was curious if there were any BIOS settings that I missed to squeeze a few extra MHz out of this 2500+. I know with the SATA drive I was hitting 2.1 GHz easily, now I am lucky to hit 1.9 GHz.

I know the obvious solution is to go S939 and forget thee problems, but I am extremely poor and I have to squeeze every last bit of performance from this 3 yr. old mobo and proc. that I can. BTW I have a decent PAL heatsink, so heat is not a problem. I max out at 54 C, while cracking RC5.

 

[MobiusPizza]

Are you using a different PSU now? PSU have a large influence on overclocking
Also it seems the PCI frequency is to blame. Can you lock the PCI frequency in BIOS to default 33Mhz and just o/c the FSB?

 

[natto fire]

I am now using an Antec true 480. My mobo does not support locking the PCI BUS, unless I can find a BIOS that supports it maybe? Or is that a hardware problem?

 

[Googer]

Yes, Paralel ATA is much more sensitvie to over-clocking. Years ago (4 or 5 maybe) Some HDD's (Maxtor I think) would limit how high you could over clock your motherboards FSB. My memory is a bit sketchy on this.

Any time you overclock a parallel (1284, IDE, PCI-legacy, SCSI, etc) bus/interconnect it can mess up the timing of the data being sent/recieved causing skew. Serial data paths are far less likely by nature (RS232, USB, 1394, PCI-express) to suffer from data corruption/timing issues at higher speeds. As speed increases on a Parallel data path the (time) window of opertuninty decreases for all the data to arrive at it's destination ( some arrive sooner than others, only nanoseconds apart) in the time allowed before the next batch of BITS gets sent out.

 

[boshuter]

Originally posted by: Googer
Yes, Paralel ATA is much more sensitvie to over-clocking. Years ago (4 or 5 maybe) Some HDD's (Maxtor I think) would limit how high you could over clock your motherboards FSB. My memory is a bit sketchy on this.

Any time you overclock a parallel (1284, IDE, PCI-legacy, SCSI, etc) bus/interconnect it can mess up the timing of the data being sent/recieved casing skew. Serial data paths are far less likely by nature (RS232, USB, 1394, PCI-express) to suffer from data corruption/timing issues at higher speeds. As speed increases on a Parallel data path the (time) window of opertuninty decreases for all the data to arrive at it's destination ( some arrive sooner than others, only nanoseconds apart) in the time allowed before the next batch of BITS gets sent out.

That is true........ except for the fact that you can lock the pci bus. Most chipsets will overclock much higher fsb using an ide hdd than an sata. My 925xe chipset board won't boot with an SATA drive at anything over 275fsb, it will do well over 300fsb with an IDE drive. That's why most of the top oc'ers going for max mhz or fsb will always use an IDE hdd. The 955 chipset is much more forgiving, I can boot at 332fsb on my P5WD2 with SATA drive.. not sure how high it will go as my cpu maxes out at that speed.