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Re: SATA Silicon Image 3114 support for A64 images ?



tony,

a normal system looks like following:

PCI Bus - 33 MHz fixed
AGP - 66MHz fixed
FSB - Front Side Bus - variable, normally (usually) 200MHz on intel and amd
platforms.

Now, the issue you're talking about:

My Athlon64 3000+ runs at 1800 MHz real. That's 200 FSB * 9.
If I raise FSB to 278, 278 * 9 = 2500 MHz.
PCI and AGP remains fixed at 33MHz.

BUT ! The nVidia SATA controller - which also runs at 33MHz like PCI - gets
it's clock from the FSB. If it raises, it's clock raises too. It's
multiplier is 6, so 33 MHz * 6 = 200 MHz - no overclock.

Now, find out, how much does it get at oc'-ed 278 FSB. 46.33 MHz - that's
far beyond healthy level so don't ask why SATA controllers lock up when
overclocking PC-s.

The other integrated controller - usually silicon image, sis, whatever ...
they're bound to the PCI bus, not to the special nvidia "bus" thing - their
clock is fixed at 33MHz, and it doesn't matter if you raise FSB or not -
your HDD's will work.

That's the whole tale and that's why overclocking has NOTHING to do with
this sata_sil issue - look at Knoppix ;)

Cheers: Eperkutyus

----------

tony, you wrote:
On a tangential note, some of the motherboards have problems when
overclocked with only some of the SATA controllers.  I'm running an Asus
AV8-Deluxe and ran into lockups during bootup using the VIA controller, but
after moving the drive over to the Promise 20378 (non-RAID mode, obviously),
no issues.  It would never have occurred to try this me except for some
comments about this mobo and OCing on one of the OC websites
(http://www.xtremesystems.org/, IIRC).



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