SATA overclocking

Spikesoldier

Diamond Member
Oct 15, 2001
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i am considering buying a SATA drive, but I have a fear of it not working, or in order for it to work having me come down in my system overclock.

right now im running an NF3 board, an Epox 9NDA3J running at 278fsb.

this is the basic model, with only 2 SATA 150 ports.

I have noticed that some people say when overclocking, to run your SATA off ports 3 and 4, or 1 and 2 depending on the model.

since my board only has 2 ports to begin with, does that mean that I might have problems running a SATA drive on this board?

I would just hate to order something then not have it work, or me taking down my overclock. I would rather refund and take a restocking fee than bringing down my speed.

any other owners have their experiences?
 

Lord Evermore

Diamond Member
Oct 10, 1999
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Most likely when they tell you to run the drives off particular ports, it's because those ports are controlled by an add-in SATA controller, such as from Promise, rather than the controllers integrated into the chipset. If you overclock the CPU bus, you may be overclocking the entire chipset, which would result in the SATA ports being overclocked and possibly being unstable. Since an add-in controller uses the PCI bus (or some newer ones use PCI-Express but you don't have that), if the mainboard locks the PCI bus at its normal speed, then those ports don't get overclocked.

I've never particularly noticed any complaints about SATA ports not liking overclocking, too many people overclock massively without problems for it to be a real issue, so I suspect the SATA ports may in fact be locked at a particular speed, since the CPU bus overclock should only affect that one bus in modern systems.
 

obeseotron

Golden Member
Oct 9, 1999
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Originally posted by: Lord Evermore
Most likely when they tell you to run the drives off particular ports, it's because those ports are controlled by an add-in SATA controller, such as from Promise, rather than the controllers integrated into the chipset. If you overclock the CPU bus, you may be overclocking the entire chipset, which would result in the SATA ports being overclocked and possibly being unstable. Since an add-in controller uses the PCI bus (or some newer ones use PCI-Express but you don't have that), if the mainboard locks the PCI bus at its normal speed, then those ports don't get overclocked.

I've never particularly noticed any complaints about SATA ports not liking overclocking, too many people overclock massively without problems for it to be a real issue, so I suspect the SATA ports may in fact be locked at a particular speed, since the CPU bus overclock should only affect that one bus in modern systems.

Nforce3 has a native SATA controller, not a Promise PCI Chip. The Nforce3 can also lock the PCI speed at 33Mhz regardless of overclocking the HTT, so if it were an external chip this wouldn't be a problem.

To the OP: My K8N Neo2 Platinum has locked SATA3/4, but not 1/2, sorry if that doesn't help too much. Worst case, buy a PCI SATA controller for $20, that's what I did when I ran out of locked SATA ports.