Sata and overclocking

[Dreamer-1982]

Hello,

I have some problems with my sata drive when overclocking. First some info on my system:

Asus P5GD1-PRO (Intel 915P chipset)
Intel Pentium 4 640 (3,2GHz)
Arctic Freezer 7 Pro
Corsair 1GB (2x512MB) Twinx Pro
Sapphire ATi Radeon X850XT PCIe
Maxtor 300GB SATA

The PCI and PCIe are fixed at 33 / 100.
After 220FSB the system doesn't find the SATA drive anymore, so at 220FSB the SATA drive is still there and the system is 100% stable (at 16x220=3520MHz), but at 221FSB or higher the SATA drive is not detected anymore. I installed an 80GB IDE drive and the systems works stable at 250+FSB.

The conclusion I got from this is that the SATA clock is not locked and therefore the SATA drive isn't detected anymore. On forums I only found that some nVidia chipset (I thought for AMD) had SATA lock. But I dind't found exact info on how it's done by Intel chipsets, the only thing I found was that some people stated that when PCI is locked, SATA should also be locked, but that doesn't seem to be the case with my P5GD1-PRO bord.

I want to know more about this because I want to upgrade to the new Conroe CPU and don't want the SATA be in the way with overclocking, but I of course want to use the ICH7R (or ICH8R that depends on my mobo choice) with at least two decent SATA drives in RAID0. Again I didn't find anything about this, and in the Conroe tests I saw till now most reviewers use an IDE disk or don't mention anything about this, and I wondered if they did this because SATA didn't work anymore when overclocking.

The only thing I found on this was on this forum in this thread:
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=103025

At the last BIOS screenshot is the option I'm talking about:
"SATA Clock Sync. with" and selected is "Fix 100MHz".

This is the first BIOS screenshot of an Conroe mobo that shows this option.

What about other Conroe bords based on the 975x or 965 chipset? Do they always fix the SATA clock so it's never a problem or what? I'm interested the most at this moment in the Asus P5W DH Deluxe, as it has all the features I want and I already saw great overclocking results with an E6600 on air. But I want to know for sure what's done with the SATA lock.

Anybody?

Greetz,
Paul

 

[CjStaal]

It is probally because the system bus is too fast for it... is your SATA built in to the motherboard? If that's so then you should go get a PCI SATA card; that should fix your problem.

EDIT: After reading your post all the way I can see you have it figured out smart one ey? lol

 

[Dreamer-1982]

It should be possible with the Intel ICH-R southbridge...who wants a PCI SATA card if the have a nice working Intel ICH-R?!

 

[CjStaal]

I don't know much about that sb chipset, well actually I don't really know alot about SB chipsets in general. It might have a lock on it, who knows? Google it and you should be able to come up with a conclusion, as for me, I'm going to go buy a book or something on SB chipsets =/ or an E-book

 

[Dreamer-1982]

The Intel ICH(R) is one of the most used SB's, that's why I can't stand that I can't lock the SATA (or at least don't know how to). And because I want to upgrade to the Conroe as soon as it's there it's important to know that my SATA drivers aren't in the way when overclocking. And as you can see at the site (on the last BIOS screenshot) that I linked to, the DFI Infinity 975X also has the Intel ICH7R SB and it has the option to lock the SATA clock. So it should be possible, but with al other Intel 975X+ICH7R or 965+ICH8R boards I didn't read anything about this SATA locking...

 

[CjStaal]

hmmm... might be a hidden thing that the developers didn't want to add to the bios.... idk... They probally were too lazy to write in the code needed.. can't blame them though... it has to be all written in hex (I think?) and that takes alot of time, imo.

 

[Dreamer-1982]

I don't think large mobo manufacturers like Asus are writing al BIOSES by hand in a low level language. I think they've developed there own (higher language) tools where they write the BIOS in and then compile that to hex or whatever...

 

[Deleted member 24505]

i have a asus p5wd2 with ich7r sb,i have my fsb at 270 now with 2 drives on raid 0 using the ich7r's sata connections with no problem.

 

[Dreamer-1982]

Ok, that's valuable info! Did you lock PCI to 33 and PCIe to 100? Than I'm sure that the P5W DH Deluxe also locks sata!

 

[sefu]

Y had that motherboard Asus P5GD1-PRO and other with 915P and intel 630 cpu, no sata detection over 250 fsb, no way only IDE drives, is the same on al I915P chipset based motherboards, you can't fix that only by changing your mb.

 

[CjStaal]

I think Dreamer has a more "up to date" motherboard and the northbridge chipset doesn't handle hdd's and such...

 

[Deleted member 24505]

yep,my pci is locked to 33,pci to 100.