PCI-E overclock?

Last update for the evening.. I almost think I am doing something wrong. I am now at 160mhz showing no errors in checksum. My motherboard's settings in the bios only go up to 145mhz so I really am beginning to think I'm doing something wrong but anyways. Just thought I would update on what I've doen thus far. Sorry, no long scan for artifacts but I did manage to get 2 minutes in woth no errors. I'm off to bed. work at 4 am stinks but its a living.
 
it's possible that you can actually go that high. i just got done what i need to do ;)
and it's now shower time. after that i'll see what's shaking :D

edit cause i don't like double posting :p

so. that was interesting. at 100mhz pci-e bus, my 7600gt tops out at 630mhz / 865mhz with stock voltage. i was testing just the firefly scene in '05 cause i'm lazy, and that's the only one my card ever crashes on when i'm benching, so...
between runs, when i changed speeds, i waited for the thermal probe on my heatsink to lower back down to 35c for consistant results.

so at stock, 630/865
110mhz, it locked up at the very end, with weird blue blocks. this is with the pci-e bus set in the bios, so lock issues for the pci bus shouldn't be an issue
120mhz, it didn't even make it to the loading screen, comp just hard-locked
after that, i went back to 100mhz to make sure it wasn't a fluke. no problems.

i think i'll be staying with 100mhz from now on :(
 
Interesting... what MoBo do you run? I may set the bus speed in the bios today rather than use clockgen. It may show different results. Funky blue blocks huh? I'll keep an eye out for those.Like I said I've had no issues with 160 but I'll do a run of 3dmark today at that speed.
 
(cf)Eclipse said:
it's possible that you can actually go that high. i just got done what i need to do ;)
and it's now shower time. after that i'll see what's shaking :D

edit cause i don't like double posting :p

so. that was interesting. at 100mhz pci-e bus, my 7600gt tops out at 630mhz / 865mhz with stock voltage. i was testing just the firefly scene in '05 cause i'm lazy, and that's the only one my card ever crashes on when i'm benching, so...
between runs, when i changed speeds, i waited for the thermal probe on my heatsink to lower back down to 35c for consistant results.

so at stock, 630/865
110mhz, it locked up at the very end, with weird blue blocks. this is with the pci-e bus set in the bios, so lock issues for the pci bus shouldn't be an issue
120mhz, it didn't even make it to the loading screen, comp just hard-locked
after that, i went back to 100mhz to make sure it wasn't a fluke. no problems.

i think i'll be staying with 100mhz from now on :(
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And that's more often than not what I see happening...weird that Willsonman is having so much more "luck" cranking the PCI-E bus.
 
OK, had a long day of bondo but I've shaken off the dust and have done a little more.

I set the bus in the bios and ran the checksum... nothing.... BUT... 3dmark retruned a score of 1243 with stock settings. as mentioned earlier at 110 with clockgen I got a 3dmark score of 1729.... sooooo I'm gonna start all over again but this time I'll only set the bus in the bios. Looks like I will have some more reliable results.
 
sounds like it's a touch too high and was causing instability. did you notice any freezing up for a second or two?
 
No, no freezing but since it is rainy here today I cant do much outside so I'll have some time to work on things. Not to mention my new vga ram sinks should be getting here today. :)
 
Willsonman said:
No, no freezing but since it is rainy here today I cant do much outside so I'll have some time to work on things. Not to mention my new vga ram sinks should be getting here today. :)
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Very nice...what 'sinks are on the way?

Swiftech's got some nice BGA ramsinks, and OCZ's are pretty nice...but FrozenCPU has the best IMO. Check out the size difference shown at their site here...simply amazing. I've only ever seen one or two pics of people usin' em...I might have to go with a pack of them for my X850XT-PE as it'll be runnin' on water...and even if I have to trim down a couple of the ramsinks, those 'sinks from FrozenCPU literally do dward the competition. :D

EDIT: Looks like I wouldn't even half to trim the ramsinks...Swiftech's MCW60 VGA block works perfectly well with swiftech's own ramsinks, and the FrozenCPU 'sinks are only 0.5mm taller...w00t. :D
 
No, just zalman ramsinks. Last father's day I got a zalman gpu cooler that came with ramsinks and all but... then I got an x700 Pro... then the X800GTO2 so the ramsinks did not stick as well so I've been running without them forawhile and it was making me uncomfortable.
 
Willsonman said:
No, just zalman ramsinks. Last father's day I got a zalman gpu cooler that came with ramsinks and all but... then I got an x700 Pro... then the X800GTO2 so the ramsinks did not stick as well so I've been running without them forawhile and it was making me uncomfortable.
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I hear ya man...but I ran my X800XT-PE without ramsinks with some extra voltage going to the memory, and the memory itself clocked at 1280Mhz. :cool:
 
The only reason I've found for raising the pcie speed is to be able to boot at very high fsb. I can't say for sure if it's only on my board (Asus P5WD2), but it will only boot to around 250fsb at the stock 100mhz, anything over 250fsb and I raise my pcie to 101mhz; at this setting I can boot to at least 350fsb and have clocked up to 400fsb in windows. I've seen reports that using 105mhz would result in better bench scores, but I didn't find that to be the case with my system. I'm not sure why going from "auto" or 100mhz to 101mhz makes that much difference, but if I don't set it to 101 I don't get video at high fsb.

Regarding the vga sinks.... I have a set of all 3 mentioned, I have had a set of the OCZs on my X850XT PE for quite a while, I just got the new Swiftech MCW60 with the bga sinks for my X1900XTX but haven't installed them yet, I tried the HUGE ones from FCPU before I got the OCZs but they wouldn't stay on the bottoms side of the card, they are so heavy that using thermal tape to hold them on is not an option. Of the 3 sets, the OCZs are my favorite; I can't back it up with any evidence, but the design just looks more efficient than the Swiftechs.
 
boshuter said:
The only reason I've found for raising the pcie speed is to be able to boot at very high fsb. I can't say for sure if it's only on my board (Asus P5WD2), but it will only boot to around 250fsb at the stock 100mhz, anything over 250fsb and I raise my pcie to 101mhz; at this setting I can boot to at least 350fsb and have clocked up to 400fsb in windows. I've seen reports that using 105mhz would result in better bench scores, but I didn't find that to be the case with my system. I'm not sure why going from "auto" or 100mhz to 101mhz makes that much difference, but if I don't set it to 101 I don't get video at high fsb.

Regarding the vga sinks.... I have a set of all 3 mentioned, I have had a set of the OCZs on my X850XT PE for quite a while, I just got the new Swiftech MCW60 with the bga sinks for my X1900XTX but haven't installed them yet, I tried the HUGE ones from FCPU before I got the OCZs but they wouldn't stay on the bottoms side of the card, they are so heavy that using thermal tape to hold them on is not an option. Of the 3 sets, the OCZs are my favorite; I can't back it up with any evidence, but the design just looks more efficient than the Swiftechs.
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Good call...I do kind prefer the look of the OCZ's myself.

In terms of the FCPU ramsinks, they'd probly just need an actual arctic silver epoxy mix...but they do look like they'd do quite a bit better with some direct airflow.

Weird about the PCI-E clock and how it lets you boot at much higher bus speeds...good info, I'll have to keep that in mind and see if it has any effect on my AW8-MAX i955X board.
 
Did more fiddleing with my CPU OC and the PCI-E OC. At 2.6 I cannot find a single stable setting for the PCI-E. I'll get to windows but then it will freeze. that was at 101, 105, and 110 mhz. I'll try playing with it at stock speeds later but this all makes me wonder about the use of clockgen for this. in the previous version when you could adjust your CPU voltage the readouts were wrong but I managed to do it ok with cpu-z open monitoring the voltage. Its not in this version and I am thinking they should just remove the PCI-E bus frequency since it seems to me that it really does nothing.

I have everest and looking into it in more detail I do not see anything that monitors the PCI-E bus frequency. I also noticed that it says that I have my PCI-E X2 port #3 slot occupied at 4X. HUH? :confused: I will take a closer look at the bios settings.

Sorry nothing new or exciting but I guess thats what this is all about.
 
Willsonman said:
Did more fiddleing with my CPU OC and the PCI-E OC. At 2.6 I cannot find a single stable setting for the PCI-E. I'll get to windows but then it will freeze. that was at 101, 105, and 110 mhz. I'll try playing with it at stock speeds later but this all makes me wonder about the use of clockgen for this. in the previous version when you could adjust your CPU voltage the readouts were wrong but I managed to do it ok with cpu-z open monitoring the voltage. Its not in this version and I am thinking they should just remove the PCI-E bus frequency since it seems to me that it really does nothing.

I have everest and looking into it in more detail I do not see anything that monitors the PCI-E bus frequency. I also noticed that it says that I have my PCI-E X2 port #3 slot occupied at 4X. HUH? :confused: I will take a closer look at the bios settings.

Sorry nothing new or exciting but I guess thats what this is all about.
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Fair enough, the effort you're putting in is still worth a thanks...but I'm still gonna try out the PCI-E speed bump when I get my sig system to see how things work out on this end.
 
New news. I managed to steal some time from the wife today. The laptop is ordered to solve that issue.

I set the cpu at stock settings and OCed the PCI-E bus in 1 mhz increments. I made it to ten with no errors in checksum and ran a complete run of 3dmark06. Scores raged from 1488 to 1498. definately within the margin of error. From this I think its pretty safe to say that OCing the bus does not improve system performance.

I also have a pretty safe conclusion that OCing the bus is a pretty good indication of a stable CPU OC. I'll look more into this for a more conclusive evidence. I want to try different OC settings i have played with. Recalling to an earlier post...
At 2.6 I cannot find a single stable setting for the PCI-E. I'll get to windows but then it will freeze. that was at 101, 105, and 110 mhz.
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So being able to just prime for 24 hours straight may not be the best way to determine OC stability. At any rate... Bed time for me.
 
I went through a barrage of cpu speeds testing the bus at 100 and 110 mhz. Nothing hiccuped until I hit 2.6 ghz. Like I said before all of the settings I had for this were prime stable for 24 hours and ran everything fine and never have I had problems with this oc. BUT I again had the same issue with the computer freezing whenever I would enter 3d mode. so I bumped up the CPU voltage by one setting. Thats 1.44v to 1.46v. all worked perfectly. SOOOOO...

all tests were done in 64-bit windows this time since I never experienced any file corruption while OCing the bus from the bios up to 130 mhz. My install of 64-bit is on my SATAII drive.

at 1.8(stock) ghz
pci-e @ 100...1491 3dmarks
pci-e @ 110...1492 3dmarks

at 2 ghz
100...2104 3dmarks
110...2109 3dmarks

at 2.34 ghz
100...2157 3dmarks
110...2161 3dmarks

at 2.6 ghz
100...2204 3dmarks
110...2202 3dmarks

As I have NOT encountered ANY file corruption at 130mhz on the PCI-E bus its pretty safe to say that OCing the bus may be a good double check of a more stable CPU OC. Though my rig never had any troubles at the slightly lower voltage setting it may be a good indication that things just needed a little more juice. just my 2 cents.

Another interesting point is that when I OCed the bus fromthe bios clockgen would in fact dectect that setting. Gives more validity to setting the speed from clockgen but the fact that I had the bus up to 160 mhz at my 1.44v CPU OC without problems still leaves a little doubt.

I also managed to get in some time yesterday playing with overclocking the videocard with higher bus speeds. I saw no difference. I used atitool to do the oc and at 101, 110, and 125 mhz the oc was still stable at my regular oc speeds. Hope that solves a little bit of mystery for some.

sorry for the long post but I wanted to be thorough. Any other tests or ideas?
 
No other ideas I've got, and I'm not sure if the matter of higher PCI-E clocks increasing system OC's has much validity to AMD systems, but I'll be glad to check it out when I get my new hardware.
 
cornelious0_0 said:
No other ideas I've got, and I'm not sure if the matter of higher PCI-E clocks increasing system OC's has much validity to AMD systems, but I'll be glad to check it out when I get my new hardware.
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yeah but do you think in your opinion its an ok double-check of stabilty?
 
Willsonman said:
yeah but do you think in your opinion its an ok double-check of stabilty?
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It couldn't hurt, but realistically speaking...there's no reason why it's have a lot of relevance, because it's an abnormal kind of "stress" on the system and on the PCI-E bus that might not normally be encountered.

The stability (or lack thereof) you system might maintain could be something that is motherboard specific, because the results I'm seeing are fairly varied. It might be a good thing to try, but I personally wouldnt take the time.
 
I will definately keep my eye out for your posts.... you can just post it on this thread if you want. ;)
 
Willsonman said:
I will definately keep my eye out for your posts.... you can just post it on this thread if you want. ;)
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I will use this thread...not sure when it'll happen, but just keep an eye on the thread every once and awhile.
 
I dont buy it. Nothing done to actually back it up. My scores stayed just about the same. but then again that card uses more bandwidth :confused:
 
im tempted to fool with it on my computer now...
everything is running so good i don't feel like messing with settings on my comp right now.

AAAAARRRGHH, WHAT TO DO!?!?!?
 
Changing the bus speed should not effect any other setting and cannot hurtas mentioned previously in this thread. Post your results!
 
Go for it man, but go slow...I still have seen people "nuking" their XP installs by taking PCI-E frequencies too far beyond spec...depends on the mobo though, as is (looks like) the case with weather the "overclock" does anything or not to effect performance.
 
I am currently running a P5LD2-VM and when I locked my PCIe to 118 my screen went black while playing need for speed most wanted and now my monitor is not receiving a signal from my X1900xt..and doesn't seem like my HDD is working either :(
I already ordered a new Mobo since am assuming its dead eventhough I see its still getting power (greenlight is on).
If anyone knows something I dont know let me know.

I swear this was caused because I didn't lock it to 33.3mhz and left it on the " PCI express " setting as one person said on the xtremesystems forums :(

becareful you guys. Happy OC'ing !
 
I reset the cmos 50 billion times while screaming noooooooo .. but it didnt work. Oh wait you said Bios :confused: the jumper right ??
 
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