Intel 975 chipset strap/overclocking guide

[Kougar]

If you are stuck at a ~370FSB overclock on your 975X motherboard but you want to go higher, then you should definitely give this a read though. :paw:

The definitive guide to Intel chipset/memory over clocking.


After many years of over clocking Intel based platforms and studying Intel chipset white papers I think its time to pass on some of the knowledge I have acquired.

http://www.bleedinedge.com/forum/showthread.php?t=22297 (http://www.bleedinedge.com/forum/showthread.php?t=22297)

This has to be the most surprising thing I've come across about overclocking an Intel board, mostly because I've never heard of it until now. I'm going to test this out on my 865P board and see how well it works out, as this could explain a few things.... And from everything I've seen, I'm pretty sure this is the ticket to those high overclocks... ;)

[GIBSON]

This sure is some complicated material though. I gave it a read and kind of understand it, but not for a 100% I think. Might have to reread it to get the whole thing.

[Kougar]

Well, I can't really explain it better than he did with his example that the northbridge is like it's own miniture CPU, with it's own clockspeed that is strapped to the FSB speed. Basically he's saying that unless the manufacturer pulls some not to cheap modifications to the motherboard, you will have to "underclock" the northbrdige to ramp the FSB speeds even higher. Using his CPU analogy, sort of like lowering the CPU mulitplier so you can raise the FSB speed sort of thing, except for the chipset. ;)

When I have a few hours to kill doing manual CMOS resets and hard reboots I'll give this a shot and see if I can actually figure it out myself... ;)

[GIBSON]

Well, I can't really explain it better than he did with his example that the northbridge is like it's own miniture CPU, with it's own clockspeed that is strapped to the FSB speed. Basically he's saying that unless the manufacturer pulls some not to cheap modifications to the motherboard, you will have to "underclock" the northbrdige to ramp the FSB speeds even higher. Using his CPU analogy, sort of like lowering the CPU mulitplier so you can raise the FSB speed sort of thing, except for the chipset. ;)

When I have a few hours to kill doing manual CMOS resets and hard reboots I'll give this a shot and see if I can actually figure it out myself... ;)
Well, I can kind of figure that out. One thing though, can the user himself actually do anything about this, I mean, is there a way to underclock the chipset. (I don't really remember it being explained in the article, there was a bit about ratio's that I found rather complicated too, going to have to have a look at that again too.)

[Kougar]

I wasn't sure if it required the motherboard manufacturer to enable a little tweaking of their own or not. However it's easily enough to see something is holding the majority of motherboard overclocks at 370-380FSB range, while a select few can OC up the wall and he may have found out why. So far though the only thing I've managed to do with my own 865P chipset it prove to myself that I can't OC any higher no matter the RAM and MCH strap settings... :lol: