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Overclocking the AGP Bus.. Does it do anything?

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Darrell262

Weaksauce
Joined
Jul 9, 2004
Messages
118
Hi, just tweaking my lan box here..

Everything is running nice at 220x10, with a radeon 9700pro at 330x300 (Yes I know its old but I can't afford new stuff right now...

Oh, I am running a Abit NF7-S board...

Does upping the AGP bus speed from a default/stock 66mhz to 67 or whatever do anything?

I remember in a forum a very long time ago some talk about it but I can't remember if it does anything or not.
 
It won't do a whole lot, but it causes problems. It also ups your PCI bus, unless they're separately locked, and it can fry your HD's and cause lockups and a host of other problems. I wouldn't recommend it. Some other people may have more insight, but from what I've heard, it's generally a bad idea. Upping the voltage on your AGP slot to 1.6v might help, but I'm not sure if the cards can even utilize more than 1.5v or not...
 
Thanks for your input. Yeah I didn't think it helped any, but I remember someone saying something about 3dmark and it helping or something.. I already have my agp at 1.7 to maintain stability in games (read doesn't crash anymore) Wondering if 1.8 is a safe level..

Well I'll leave it at 66 for now,
 
I would not recommend doing that. By upping the bus speed, you are essentially increasing the bandwidth of the whole AGP bus. While this may allow faster exchange of data between your chipset and your 3d card, you are going to see very, very small gains IF any at all by doing this. And at the same time, you are making your system less stable and more likely to lock up etc. Also, even todays top of the line video cards barely even push 8x agp anywhere close to its theoretical maximum bandwidth. Now we have the new PCI-E bus which does increase the bandwidth alot, but it will be years before they are pushing it's limits. I have a 9800 pro in one of my boxes which was originally on an 8x bus, but moved to an older computer wih a 4x bus after I got my 6800GT. I actually get a bit higher benchmark scores on the 4x bus than the 8x with same proc speed. Gains were only in the 2-3% range but the point is, you will see no benefit of overclocking the AGP bus.
 
This is why there is locked agp/pci motherboards to help overclocking. Mine doesn't have a lock so i'm capped by the agp bus which won't run well over 70 Mhz.
 
Think of the chip on the card as the brain, and the bus is the neck. Overclocking is like ritalin and injecting it into your neck will only mess you up.






Edit: Worst. Analogy. Ever.
 
KingPariah777 said:
Think of the chip on the card as the brain, and the bus is the neck. Overclocking is like ritalin and injecting it into your neck will only mess you up.






Edit: Worst. Analogy. Ever.
Click to expand...

Ummm yeah bad analogy. LOL

You dont have much leeway with the AGP bus b/c many new videocards are very sensitive to the AGP clocks. Thats why its so important for overclocking to have an AGP lock. You could probably safely set it to 68/34 but for that 3% AGP overclock, you probably would never notice a difference... probably less than 1% improvement.

Back with 2x AGP overclocking the AGP bus actually helped with like the GF2 cards... I used to run my GF2 GTS on a BX motherboard at 150Mhz FSB, and only a 2/3 AGP ratio.... so my AGP bus was at 100Mhz!!! But newer cards generally get finicky between 69-72Mhz
 
The PCI buss lock is independent of the AGP buss on this motherboard.

I run mine at 72MHz with an MSI T!4200, it does a little, 10 or 20 points in 3Dmark (the old one -2001 version I think, its been a long time since I benched it)

So its not going to make any difference you can "feel" I mainly bump mine up because its there and contrary to the comments above it wont hurt a thing, I you go too high you well get odd video or none at all. If that happens, power off, turn off the power supply or unplug from the wall, count to 5, and while holding down the insert key power back up and boot.
 
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