Will upping my pci-e frequency to 110 (or so) make me oc higher?

[swtethan]

Max I can go on my vc is 620mhz, will a slot frequency of 110mhz (i am already locked at 100) make me able to overclock more? or is this the end of the road?

 

[AlucardX]

I wouldn't touch it. It wouldn't increase your CPU overclock, it would just increase the speed at which your PCI-e bus communicates, if anything making your 8800gts a little faster, in theory.

in reality, it will probably cause crashing and general video card weirdness. there's a reason you always keep pci, pci-e, etc locked at its default bus speed.

 

[imported_PrinceGaz]

In a word, No. PCI-E bandwidth is never a bottleneck with any normal application, so overclocking it will have no benefit. The only likely difference you will see from upping the PCI-E speed is increased chance of instability. If I were you, I'd leave it at the default.

 

[lopri]

Well.. If you're into benchmarking, it does help both for GPU overclocking (it depends on the GPU, though. G71 and G80 are prime candidates) and higher performance. On nForce chipset boards, if you raise the PCI-E frequency up to 130~150MHz and at the same time overclock the HT link so that it doesn't hinder the PCI-E bandwidth, you will actually see a sizeable benefit in benchmarks. It's really only for professional benchers, though, since not many boards and video cards can handle such a high amount of stress. The benefit is more pronounced in SLI setup, where you set both PEG's clocks to 130+MHz and HyperTransport clock to something like 300x5. (instead of 200x5 standard) I tried this once before with 7900 GTX SLI where both PCI-E lane and HT link overclocked almost 40% (PCI-E clock 135, HT link 333x4=1333) - 3DMark06, 3DMark05, and F.E.A.R. bench all showed a healthy boost. Of course it was just an experiment and I would never recommend such a crazy configuration for 24/7.

 

[Sylvanas]

There was a thread on XS a while ago about this and many people did claim it helped them reach higher OC's on their video card. I tried it and although I didn't achieve a higher core clock it did help stability of my GTX at OC'd speeds where previously it would lock up an hour or so into a game, it is fine now @ 120mhz PCI-E. Nvidia 680i boards have a feature called 'Linkboost' which automatically sets the PCI-E bus to 125mhz when a G71/G80 is detected, so I guess those cards are certified by Nvidia to be fine at that frequency.

 

[lopri]

Well, for instance..

F.E.A.R. Max Everything @1024x768: 173
F.E.A.R. Max Everything @1600x1200: 144

That was with 7900 GTX SLI. Apparently Soft Shadow wasn't working with the drivers I used (forgot the version) but the average FPS went up by like ~20FPS. I haven't seen any higher scores with F.E.A.R.'s built-in benchmark. Could've been a bug, though.