SATA interferes with overclock?

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scottmso

Limp Gawd
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Apr 15, 2004
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I have a (crappy, but it's all I can afford right now) ECS P4M800PRO-M motherboard and a Pentium D 915 (default FSB 200). I had some prior issues which seemed to be caused by the RAM but I think it was because the wrong CAS latency was chosen.

The system seems stable when the FSB is in the 220s or so - it's been running Prime95 for several hours with the FSB at 220 without any problem, albeit a little hot (in the 60s celsius but I have a small case with low airflow) Heat issues aside, when I get near the 230s, I have problems with my SATA drive. The drive's name is corrupted and of course it doesn't boot (the SATA drive is my boot drive). Is there any way to fix this? According to ECS the board is supposed to support 1066MHz FSB chips, meaning I'm not even near the 266 FSB it's supposed to support. I've also heard that the chipset (VIA P4M800PRO) was designed for 800MHz FSB chips at max and that the chipset is practically running overclocked otherwise - might that be the problem? I know that it's sorta silly to OC on a board like this but I just wanted to see what I can do with what I have. Thanks!
 
Did you lock your PCI bus? I think it should be at 33.33MHZ. If theres no option, well either thats not the issue or you are screwed if it is.
 
hmm it might employ dividers for pci/pcie, in which case you'd have to get somewhere up near 266 before it kicks in. Not sure if that's the case though or not. You may be able to just select a higher divider. Of course running with a higher divider before you hit the fsb will result in decreased performance since pci<33 but it'll help you scale up. Ideally, if you were able to run 266fsb, everything would be in check so to speak. Not sure if your cpu would take a liking to 33% boost though, since I'm not sure what the 915 has for a multiplier
 
ziddey said:
hmm it might employ dividers for pci/pcie, in which case you'd have to get somewhere up near 266 before it kicks in. Not sure if that's the case though or not. You may be able to just select a higher divider. Of course running with a higher divider before you hit the fsb will result in decreased performance since pci<33 but it'll help you scale up. Ideally, if you were able to run 266fsb, everything would be in check so to speak. Not sure if your cpu would take a liking to 33% boost though, since I'm not sure what the 915 has for a multiplier
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Multipler is 14. I was thinking that earlier, and with SATA disabled it booted at 250 (was doing multiples of 10) but it wouldn't do 260 (had to reset the BIOS with jumper :D) It doesn't look like my mobo supports PCI locks so I guess I'm screwed...
 
scottmso said:
Multipler is 14. I was thinking that earlier, and with SATA disabled it booted at 250 (was doing multiples of 10) but it wouldn't do 260 (had to reset the BIOS with jumper :D) It doesn't look like my mobo supports PCI locks so I guess I'm screwed...
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hmm, 14 is fairly low. Maybe it can handle 266fsb. Do you have vcore adjustments? If not, try a mod with conductive ink / tape (possibly white out) to bring it up a little. If you say that a new bios update brings support for 1066, then it should have the dividers that'll kick in. Maybe 260 isn't high enough to activate?
 
if you know the bios offers support for 266fsb, then perhaps you need more vcore?
 
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