Upgrading Sandy Bridge clock generator

[Mark R]

I was wondering about the practicality of modding a motherboard to replace the standard master clock generator with an external, tunable, reference clock in order to support high-precision event timing under in an RT development system.

It looks like the master oscillator is controlled by a simple 25 MHz crystal. This suggests that upgrading to an external reference clock should be a straightforward matter of simply removing the crystal and soldering an approriately terminated reference clock input signal to the chipset's crystal-input pin.

Anyone done this sort of mod before on a PC mobo?

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

Make sure you don't go out of specs... like how the SATA bug got into the old P67 boards

 

[T101]

Yes, I did it once on an old 286 machine. What it had in common with the sandy bridge is that everything runs of the common base clock frequency. Just a little bit of out of specs clock frequencies caused some major problems on that one. I dont know if the same would happen on the P67/H67 chipset, but I suspect that it will not result in anything good. Especially sata controllers tend to be sensitive to out of spec clocks, with data corruption etc as an end result.

 

[BoozeCompany]

On Sandy Bridge the clock generator is intergrated in the CPU so i dont think you can upgrade it.

 

[IntelUser2000]

On Sandy Bridge the clock generator is intergrated in the CPU so i dont think you can upgrade it.

The clock generator is in the chipset, not the CPU.

 

[Soundmanred]

The clock generator is in the chipset, not the CPU.

I have yet to find a user that joined in 2011 that has posted anything correct.
Just an observation.