Hi everyone, this question is not really about overclocking. It is simply to make sure I have set things correctly. I own an Asus P4P 800 SE MOBO and an ATI 9800 Pro 256MB video card. I have just finished setting up the computer however I am unsure of a couple of settings concerning the video card. One is the AGP/PCI frequency setting. Is this the same thing as latency, does it deal with the ratio of how much time the AGP and PCI slots can be in control of the BUS, or is it simply a measurment of speed? My current setting is 66.66/33.33 however it can go up to 80/40. What is the right setting, I only have 1 PCI device and that's my nic card. My second question is the AGP VDDQ Voltage setting, there is no AUTO in my BIOS so I have to give it a voltage setting starting from 1.5V up to 1.8V. Now if I am not mistaken an AGP 8X card like mine only uses up 0.8V, so would the right setting be 1.5V? My third and final question is the PCI latency timer, I can go from 32 to 248 clocks. I in my case having only 1 PCI device, should I set this to a low latency of just 32 clocks, in my understanding increasing the PCI latency would create a bottle neck for other devices including the AGP port right? Thanks for your help appreciate it!
Leave the AGP/PCI ratio set to 66.66/33.33. Some AGP cards can function with a high AGP speed, but PCI devices tend to get real testy at or around 40MHz. You won't gain anything by overclocking them...except data corruption. Often times the IDE and native SATA ports are linked to the PCI bus, and when these get corrupted, you can kiss your current OS installation good-bye. There's really no good reason I can come up with to change it from those settings. AGP 8X is backwards compatible with AGP 4x which uses 1.5V natively. I'd leave it at 0.8V for now. In my experience, this hasn't made a difference that I can tell. Depending on the device, you could go to 32 on the latency, but just keep in mind that the PCI latency doesn't apply only to the PCI slots, but the entire bus.
Thanks Big B, I'm not really an overclocker, I try and get things to work well first without overclocking. I will leave everything as is then, just one last thing as for the AGPvoltage I can't go lower the 1.5V even though according to ATI the 9800 uses 0.8V. But I'm pretty sure 0.8V to 1.5V is a safe zone to stick with. And one last question, I have to set the VID CMOS Setting, I have no idea what this is, and kind find anything about it either, its currently set to 62, would you know if that is a good setting or not? Thanks for your help.
If the AGP sets itself at 1.5V that's fine. Like I said, AGP 8x is backwards compatible with AGP 4x standards. I'm not really sure about the VID. In that case, I'd leave it as is.
