Finally nailed my SATA problem

[geoffco 0]

Well, rather finally identified it... A few weeks ago I was annoyed to have to ease off on my overclocking which seemed to be all fine apart from strange disk errors at shutdown... After an extensive search I have found that there are a few other examples of people having the same problem and the common factor is the VIA VT8237 Southbridge - seems that this is specifically very sensitive to even small frequency changes!So I bought myself a Silicon Image SATA card for PCI and moved the drives onto that - now all is fine and the overclock of 3.00GHz that I was trying for is finally stable :D The 2.9 -> 3.0 GHz change makes no performance difference in FS but is obvious in my photo editing software!GeoffPS. The GFX card is still reporting temperature issues but does not get close to threshold and also does not show any performance degredation!

[Guest wayupthere]

Hmm, good to know, Ive never run into any issues with it on other mobos, even under OC they seemed stable, so could just be like you said, some isolated issues. In any case, another lesson learned and noted hehe. Glad for you your issues got solved :)

[geoffco 0]

Yes, it does seem strange and I suppose that's why it took me so long to find any information or to believe it myself! I guess the VIA chip is just getting too hot so I have dropped back to 2.90GHz for now as I am worried that problems might come back! A problem with liquid cooling is that you get the CPU very well cooled but there is less airflow to other components - even with two big case fans! Might have to buy some stick-on heatsinks...I must say though that having discovered this failing I am now interested to find out if my setup could go further on a better board - after all overclocking is quite a fun hobby in it's own right so I am keeping an eye on eBay. I believe that the MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum is about the best card going for Skt939/AGP... any thoughts?GeoffPS. The current board is an ASUS A8V (NOT the deluxe version)

[Guest baksteen33]

Hi Geoff, that's a nForce3, isn't it? If, it's a very good chipset and you shouldn't hesitate. ;-) A nForce4 would be fine too. You're right about the cooling as far as I would dare to judge. Unfortunately, it doesn't take away that the throughput from your Raptors easily overflows the current SB. If memory isn't failing, a VT8237 does some 150-160Mb/s max vs ~270 on a nForce3(4?). The Raptor delivers upto/over 90Mb/s. Hope this adds to thoughts and kind regards Jaap Search pointers: S-ATA HD VT8237 Via A8V Problem It's better to use P-ATA HDs with Via VT8237 mainboards. In particular with multiple harddrives. ;-)

[geoffco 0]

>...that's a nForce3, isn't it? If, it's a very good>chipset and you shouldn't hesitate. ;-) A nForce4 would be>fine too... >Yes, that is an nForce3 chipset - I hear only good things about it wherever I ask :) In fact, I have a bid on a board in eBay right now...I don't think you can get nForce4 on an AGP board so that will be for a future major upgrade in a few months (years?)... Right now Intel are (for want of a better expression) weeing all over AMD with their C2D chips but I hope one day soon AMD will come out with some new magic of their own... Then I'll think about a major upgrade since I've always been an AMD-boy when it comes to processors ;)Cheers,Geoff

[geoffco 0]

It is done! Got the MSI card last week and made the change. Since then I've been tweaking and testing that everything is working properly - and it is :)It took a bit of messing around but I finally got 3.00GHz out of my 4800+ chip which has been the objective for some time...Started off with the CPU voltage at 1.500 but found that it's still stable at 1.475 so reduced it to keep the temps down. Currently running at a maximum of 45 degrees when loaded (3 hour test flight in fs9).Geoff