Overclocking Without a PCI/AGP/HDD lock.

C

ChrisII

Weaksauce
Joined
Jan 16, 2006
Messages
91
Hi, I just found out that my friends board only supports a PCIe lock, and that it was not possible to lock other componenets frequencies.

How is this going to limit the overclocking ability?

System:
Celeron D326
Gigabyte GA-8I945P-G
Fortron Sparkle 400W
Corsair Value Select PC2-5300
XFX GeForce 7300 GS
BenQ DW1650 Black DVD+-RW
Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 160GB SATA2

Any thoughts?
 
Well, for starters if he's running PCIe, you dont have to worry about AGP being unlocked due to the notable absence of an AGP port. As for the lack of a PCI lock, if you push it too far, you'll get HDD corruption and thus lost data and a hosed windows install.
 
What do you make of the following (from Gigabytes FAQ)

q:Can PCI frequency be divided by 5 when CPU clock set to 166?
a:Yes, since the CPU clock set to 166, PCI would be auto divided by 5. (166/5=33 MHz)

and...

q:I plan on overclocking my Celeron D326 (by raising FSB to 180Mhz+) but don't want to damage my hard drive or Graphics Card (or any other components) How do I lock the frequency of these components? Is it alrealdy locked? Thank you.

a: Dear Sir,

Thank you for supporting GIGABYTE products and contacting GBT Tech Support. As to the problem you mentioned, with the hardware specification, this model does not support lock frequency feature. By the way, the overclock result will depend on your peripheral devices, and the CPU maximum performance. We will not guarantee any result caused by system overclocking. If the system gets damage due to it, it will not be covered by warranty anymore.

If you still have any further question or suggestion about our products/service, please do not hesitate to contact with us directly. We will try our best to help you resolve the problem ASAP.

Best Regards,
GIGABYTE TECHNOLOGY

Truth is I asked this question @ Overclock.net, but nobody seems to know/aren't helping me out. It would be most appreciated if you can make something of this info.

Newegg.com has a few reviews for the MB and some have had sucess OC'ing it. What do you think?

Chris
 
Locking the bus IS essential. Without the ability to do that you will have problems when the PCI bus reaches about 34.5mhz. None of my 4 PCI SCSI controllers will work on anything but a 33mhz bus.

As far as what Gigabyte said... you OC and you are not covered under warranty for any failures. That's part of OCing... They have no legal obligation to fix it if you break it.

Sure, some people might be able to OC on the board, but OCing is no guarantee no matter what board you have. Try it... if it doesn't work and you really want to OC, get a different board. Go slow with the OC and don't try to bump the FSB too high right off the bat. Start out with a 20mhz jump and see what happens. Then do another 10mhz jump if that was successful. And if that works continue in 5mhz jumps until it doesn't work anymore, then back off. Oh... and be prepared to reinstall Windows in the event it does get corrupted. ;)

BACK-UP! BACK-UP! BACK-UP that critical data! :D
 
So why would the board include various overclocking options? I mean, it has Vcore adjustments, VDimm adjustments, FSB 100-600... surely these options are there to be used?

If it's not meant to be, it doesn't matter, but I probably would have bought an Intel board if I had known that the boards' OC abilities are crippled by the lack of this function.

Chris
 
ChrisII said:
So why would the board include various overclocking options? I mean, it has Vcore adjustments, VDimm adjustments, FSB 100-600... surely these options are there to be used?

If it's not meant to be, it doesn't matter, but I probably would have bought an Intel board if I had known that the boards' OC abilities are crippled by the lack of this function.

Chris
Click to expand...

Just as a question: are you trying to overclock via clockgen in windows, or through the bios?

I know that a lot of boards including my gigabyte require you to overclock the HTT by 1mh in the bios and everything will lock. Then you're able to overclock via clockgen in windows.

It's possible your model doesn't support it, but I thought I might as well add that.
 
ChrisII said:
So why would the board include various overclocking options? I mean, it has Vcore adjustments, VDimm adjustments, FSB 100-600... surely these options are there to be used?

If it's not meant to be, it doesn't matter, but I probably would have bought an Intel board if I had known that the boards' OC abilities are crippled by the lack of this function.

Chris
Click to expand...

They include the functions to overclock. They don't want to be left out of the market share by NOT including them. Sure they are there to be used, but they are also unsupported by warranty. If you buy a stock Mustang and add Nitros to it and blow up the motor, do you think Ford is going to replace your motor under warranty? No, they won't. Same principal here...

It all comes down to buyer be ware. Do your research before you buy a product so you get what you want. Ask questions in forums like the [H] if you can't find out the info on the manufacturers site and someone here, or on other forums, will surely know the answer. Read reviews carefully too, not just skim over benchmarks and read the conclusions. Answers can be had there too.
 
quadnad said:
Just as a question: are you trying to overclock via clockgen in windows, or through the bios?

I know that a lot of boards including my gigabyte require you to overclock the HTT by 1mh in the bios and everything will lock. Then you're able to overclock via clockgen in windows.

It's possible your model doesn't support it, but I thought I might as well add that.
Click to expand...


I'm not sure what you meant by HTT by 1mh... truth is I was looking for a decent future proof board (This one supports D9xx intels) with Sata2 and DDR2... not easy to find in a budget board.

The intention wasn't to overclock, but could have been nice. I know gigabyte offers all sorts of programs to OC from windows (EasyTune 5) but am unaware of the effectiveness of such a utility.
 
ChrisII said:
I'm not sure what you meant by HTT by 1mh... truth is I was looking for a decent future proof board (This one supports D9xx intels) with Sata2 and DDR2... not easy to find in a budget board.

The intention wasn't to overclock, but could have been nice. I know gigabyte offers all sorts of programs to OC from windows (EasyTune 5) but am unaware of the effectiveness of such a utility.
Click to expand...

Sry, I'm thinking in AMD terms. For you, it'd be the FSB you'd need to up by 1mhz. Again, this is the case with many motherboards, but it's certainly possible that yours doesn't have these capabilities.
 
Ok, so how about this: Is there a utility out there that can monitor my PCI bus speed? I could do a mild overclock (say 15Mhz) and see if the PCI bus varies...

Is that a good way of going about it?
 
anyone know how to confirm if the sata port is locked? i have an asus a8n-sli and moved my hdd to sata port 4 because it is supposedly locked. anyone know how to confirm this?
 
Edit: Answered wrong thread.

*On Topic*
I've read somewhere that newer Gigabyte boards auto-lock the PCI frequency once you start playing with it... anybody know if this is even remotly true?
 
ChrisII said:
Edit: Answered wrong thread.

*On Topic*
I've read somewhere that newer Gigabyte boards auto-lock the PCI frequency once you start playing with it... anybody know if this is even remotly true?
Click to expand...

again, in terms of my NF3 based board, that is true, but only if you overclock via the bios. If you don't overclock the FSB/HTT buy 1mhz before attempting to use something like clockgen, the PCI/AGP/PCI-E bus will stay unlocked.
 
I fully intend to use the BIOS to do the overclocking... I'll start with something moderate (5-10 MHz boost of the FSB ) and we'll see what kind of temps I'm getting.

EDIT: ha ha, my PC bottoms out @ 2.75 GHz. Anything higher and the motherboard resets itself and doesn't work.... I don't know if this is related to the lack of PCI lock or just bad overclocking components...
 
boscogne said:
anyone know how to confirm if the sata port is locked? i have an asus a8n-sli and moved my hdd to sata port 4 because it is supposedly locked. anyone know how to confirm this?
Click to expand...

I'd like to know too. I suppose we could download the proprietary diagnostic software from the manufacturers but I'm thinking there must be a simpler way.
 
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