Little tip for overclocking PCI-E boards

ChineseDemocracyGNR

Senior member
Sep 11, 2004
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I don't know if this will help the people running the new A64 PCI-E boards, but it doesn't hurt to give it a shot. From an X-bit labs articles on a Intel 915/925 board:

"The Foxconn 915A01-8EKRS2 mainboard, based on the i915P Express chipset, was the first to take place on our testbed.

Starting out cheerfully we soon stopped at 217MHz FSB ? the system would not start up at a higher FSB clock rate. That?s not much, yes? One might even believe to people saying the i915/i925 chipsets were made protected against overclocking, and the mainboard makers had to avoid this protection. So, are these 217 megahertz really the overclocking peak for the 915A01-8EKRS2?

Of course, there?s no special protection against overclocking in i915/i925, but mainboards based on these chipsets are really difficult to overclock because of the high-speed PCI Express bus whose implementation has made the chipset?s arbitration logics more complex. The arbitration unit is a highly sensitive mechanism, which can be influenced by a slightest change in the speed parameters of the outgoing and incoming signals. And this unit affects the stability of the whole chipset! Thus, the ratio of the frequencies of various busses is directly connected to the arbitrator?s ability to correctly process the signals under the changing circumstances.

In practice this means that the ratio of PCI Express and FSB busses becomes a crucial thing for good overclocking: increasing the FSB clock rate alone we bring some misbalance into the system, rendering it inoperative. So, our overclocking recipe is simple in this case: we must increase the PCI Express frequency, too!

And really, setting 105MHz PCI Express frequency on the reviewed mainboard we managed to achieve 225MHz FSB frequency, keeping the system stable. At 110MHz PCI Express, the maximum stable FSB frequency was 238MHz and so on. That?s already better than those 217 megahertz of the FSB clock rate we got to at first.

Cutting the long story short, we followed our overclocking recipe to get to the maximum stable FSB frequency, which we found at 248MHz. "

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articl...display/foxconn_6.html

 

MajorPayne

Senior member
Dec 23, 2004
238
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Originally posted by: ChineseDemocracyGNR
I don't know if this will help the people running the new A64 PCI-E boards, but it doesn't hurt to give it a shot. From an X-bit labs articles on a Intel 915/925 board:

"The Foxconn 915A01-8EKRS2 mainboard, based on the i915P Express chipset, was the first to take place on our testbed.

Starting out cheerfully we soon stopped at 217MHz FSB ? the system would not start up at a higher FSB clock rate. That?s not much, yes? One might even believe to people saying the i915/i925 chipsets were made protected against overclocking, and the mainboard makers had to avoid this protection. So, are these 217 megahertz really the overclocking peak for the 915A01-8EKRS2?

Of course, there?s no special protection against overclocking in i915/i925, but mainboards based on these chipsets are really difficult to overclock because of the high-speed PCI Express bus whose implementation has made the chipset?s arbitration logics more complex. The arbitration unit is a highly sensitive mechanism, which can be influenced by a slightest change in the speed parameters of the outgoing and incoming signals. And this unit affects the stability of the whole chipset! Thus, the ratio of the frequencies of various busses is directly connected to the arbitrator?s ability to correctly process the signals under the changing circumstances.

In practice this means that the ratio of PCI Express and FSB busses becomes a crucial thing for good overclocking: increasing the FSB clock rate alone we bring some misbalance into the system, rendering it inoperative. So, our overclocking recipe is simple in this case: we must increase the PCI Express frequency, too!

And really, setting 105MHz PCI Express frequency on the reviewed mainboard we managed to achieve 225MHz FSB frequency, keeping the system stable. At 110MHz PCI Express, the maximum stable FSB frequency was 238MHz and so on. That?s already better than those 217 megahertz of the FSB clock rate we got to at first.

Cutting the long story short, we followed our overclocking recipe to get to the maximum stable FSB frequency, which we found at 248MHz. "

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articl...display/foxconn_6.html

Good Find! I just got a new PCI-E Mobo (The Chaintech VNH4 Ultra) 2 days ago, and was OC'ing it this morning, and being disappointed at only being able to bump the processor up by slightly under 200 MHZ. This board let you change the PCI-E bus frequency, but does NOT change it to match the system bus for you. So I think I "outran" the PCI-E's stability point. The nice thing is that even with a 200 MHZ bump, my processor (an A64 3000+ 90nm) upped 1 degree in temp (from 20 degrees C to 21 degrees C)!! I will play with upping the PCI-E bus as I go (the one other person who I saw overclock this board on another forum upped his PCI-E bus as well). Thanks for the info!
 

KDKPSJ

Diamond Member
Dec 13, 2002
3,288
58
91
Question here.. I always wanted to know if PCI-E frequency other than 100MHz won't damage the cards plugged into like AGP/PCI clock did. I assume it won't affect the cards since I saw several screen shots with PCI-E@115+, but wish to make sure.