Pc Scaling down PCEx16 port...

[DasSmoof]

This just started happening a day or two ago, well in it's current form at least.

Occasionally, when my PC might crash while playing a game, it would boot back-up and performance would be slow. I somehow discovered that my PCIx16 port was being scaled down to x1, resulting in poor performance. I figured out that by loading optimized defaults in the BIOS and then redoing my overclock, I could fix it. Well, apparently no longer. Now, I can load my stock settings and all works fine. PCIx16. But, as soon as I overclock the CPU, it immediately drops the PCIEx16 down to PCIEx1. Any idea's what's going on? Am I not getting enough power from the PSU and so it's scaling it down? What's going on?

Gigabyte DS3 (Rev 3.3)
E4300 (When OCed: FSB 300, V.Core 1.4)
2 Gigs G.Skill DDR2 800
GeForce 8800GTS 640meg
Windows XP
Fortron 400W (Max 450W) PSU

 

[Ruptga]

Is your PCIe link speed locked at 200mhz? It may be dropping links because your overclock has them pushed out of spec, kinda like you can get one stick of memory to run at 1100mhz, but not two of them in dualchannel.

 

[DasSmoof]

I'm not sure, where do I check that?
I have a PCIe variable in my M.I.T. and I have it set to auto as it's always been and it's been fine. I set it to 100MHZ to see if that did anything, but it didn't.
It's really odd, because it never did this before and now all of a sudden it has decided to for whatever reason and it's seriously pissing me off. I'm wondering if it could be related to the PSU at all, perhaps the PSU is unable to supply sufficient power, so it's scaling it down? I'll go look around in the BIOS more...

 

[DasSmoof]

It definitely appears to be related to the FSB, because with no voltage changes and setting the FSB to 250, it scales it down...

 

[Ruptga]

Not all boards let you lock it at a certain speed, I think a simple divider is the most common way of fixing the speed. Trying it at a divider has pretty much ruled out my idea, so I'd say don't worry about it.