changing PCI frequency?

[drslump]

Hi,

I've never been able to push the FSB above 147Mhz on my ECS K7S5A mobo. The CPU is water-cooled and is kept below 30c even at full load. The RAM is marked as 333mhz DDR (from crucial) so it should have some room for improvement.
I guess the problem is with the PCI or AGP cards, is there any way to keep it's freq. at 33 while pushing the the FSB to 166mhz?

cheers, Ivan

[drslump]

I just found that is not possible to boot at 166mhz with this mobo, so I need to change it once in windows. I'll try it tonight.

[Wombat]

I thought it had a 1/5 divider, but I'm not sure. Are you using the special OCers' BIOS?

[drslump]

yes, I'm using the last Cheepo bios.
The official one will not allow to go further than 133mhz

I check changing the FSB with SpeedFan but I didn't manage to raise it more than 147mhz. I guess I'll need to raise the voltage of the CPU.

[lindberg]

Re: changing PCI frequency?

Originally posted by drslump
I guess the problem is with the PCI or AGP cards, is there any way to keep it's freq. at 33 while pushing the the FSB to 166mhz?

Buy yourself an nForce 2 card. The Epox card has PCI bus locked and AGP bus adjustable between 50..100Mhz.

I'm still waiting for mine, should arrive in about 30min

[Kooldino]

you mean nforce2 board?

Just got an a7n8x deluxe myself.
:-)

[drslump]

@lindberg:

I think I'll keep my good old ECS K7S5A

I knew that the time where I'll demand more power and I won't be able to go any further overclocking had to arrive. When I feel in the need for extra processing power I'll just upgrade the rig.
I'll check that nforce2 chip-set but being as happy as I'm with my current one, I guess my next mobo will have a SIS chip-set

cheers for the tip

[Indiana]

Yes, currently NForce2 is the way to go when using AMD CPUs. While you probably won't see much improvement against the KT333/400 chips when only testing the max. throughput (like Sandra does), the lower latency does surely speed up many memory intensive things like DivX'ing, mpeg2 / mp3 encoding, rendering and last not least CPU intensive game-titles.

I recently got my EPoX 8RDA+ NForce2 board and this little beast got me an extra of more than 1000 points in 3DMark2001SE compared to my old and already fast KT333 board: 15768 before, now 17046
(you can think what you want of 3DMark, but it is a good memory/mainboard performance benchmark - just like the good old Quake3).

[Marshmallowman]

nforce 2 is broken in linux, when nv fix their drivers I will consider one until then I will wait for 746fx board.

An alternative to the cheepo bios is the honey-x bios
all bioses are here

http://www.lejabeach.com/ECS/ez.html

the honey-x seems more stable than cheepoman, and it has all the same options(and a couple extra)

one thing about the k7s5a board is the chipset cooler, the double sided tape they use insulates more than it transfers heat, it is a good idea to rip off and remove the tape and replace it with proper thermal adhesive or use thermal grease and a dot of superglue on 2 corners....or get a better cooler . I am using a spare socket 7 cooler and fan.