ECS AMD690GM-M2

[basketcase]

Anyone out there have the ECS AMD690GM-M2 motherboard? I am trying to figure out if this board has PCI/PCI-E locks when overclocking. The board itself isn't made for OCing, but it does allow you to bump the FSB up to 232 (from 200). Which gives my x2 4000+ a nice little bump from 2100 mhz to 2436 mhz. And with this bump, it brings the ram up to its rated spec around DDR2 800. When at 200 FSB the ram is at DDR700.

My concern is that the PCI/PCI-e bus is not locking at their normal speeds when I do this, and I am afraid it will mess up my hardware. But, I did bump up the FSB to 230 and ran Prime95 for about 3 hours with no errors at all. But, I don't know that Prime95 will bring to light a problem with the PCI/PCI-e bus being to high. There is liitle I can find about this board online, a few reviews, but none that I could find specifially say whether or not these lock. And nothing in the bios appears to control it. I tried things like, Clockgen, Systool and everest to find out what the PCI/PCI-e bus is running at, but none of them can read that.

Thanks!

 

[basketcase]

Ok, one more question about this...

If there happens to be no lock, how high can you push the FSB before it makes the PCI/PCI-e bus too high. I know that it can run a little above spec (PCI=33 mhz and PCI-e=100 mhz), but how fast does it go when you have it at, lets say, 230 FSB?

Thanks again!

 

[basketcase]

Bump

 

[o1die]

Ecs is'nt known for overclocking. Fry's gives them away for a few $$ in their combo deals. If your modest overclock is stable, I would go no higher. I have an ecs board without an agp lock, so overclocking it is almost impossible.

 

[leon2006]

Get a better board for OC... Not ECS

 

[basketcase]

I know, I didn't get it to OC. I was just looking at the bios options, and thought, "hey, if I can get a nice little OC, why not?"

 

[nukemaster]

If it's not locked, you would have lots of problems.

Most times its a divider

i would assume its FSB / 2 or 200 / 2

so 230 / 2 = 115, if you ran that high there would(or should) be lots of onboard devices messing up. run it for a while and if it works fine don't worry about it....there is a tolerance but i doubt its that high.....

The problems can vary from missing network or sound card(if its on PCI-E) and in worse case corrupt hard drives(once again...if its a controller on the PCI-E bus). Video cards also do not always react well to high PCI-e speeds

 

[basketcase]

That is what I am afraid of... I was hoping someone would know if there is a PCI lock on this board, or what it would be called if it had it. I don't want to risk frying my video card, or getting corrupted data on my HD. I guess for now, I will just run stock speeds.

 

[basketcase]

Here is the last response I got from the ECS tech support. Does anyone know for sure what the are saying. To me it sounds like the PCI/PCI-e bus is detected from the hardware that is connected to it, not dependant of the FSB.

ECS Support(USA) Posted : GMT 2008/02/14 22:00:15
"Auto Detect" means it'll change the clock speed depend on the PCI/PCIe devices which you plug in. It's not related to the CPU frequency.

 

[nukemaster]

its a generic answer, but not always accurate.
On most boards auto is 33 pci and 100 PCI-E. but you say you do not even see an option on your board for auto detect.

I would reply with an question asking if running 230fsb will NOT run the PCI-E @ 115? It sucks but most tech support is just a copy and paste operation. Make it clear that your PCI-E speed NEEDS to stay at 100. see if maybe you can get a more definitive answer.

 

[basketcase]

I actually do have the option to auto detect. I just thought that was to detect if there were PCI cards and if there wasn't it would "shut off" that slot. But, maybe I was wrong.

I did reply with that same question you had... so we will see.

Thanks!

 

[basketcase]

Well, here is what they said:
******************
The PCI/PCI-e bus would stay at the normal 100/33 mhz even though you change the FSB for the CPU.
******************

I guess that means I can do the OC! Which is awesome, because, I get about 400 mhz bump and the ram will run at about 800 mhz, instead of the 700 mhz at 200 mhz FSB. Very cool indeed. Obviously, the OC isn't anything amazing, as many boards can go well above a FSB of 232. But, hey why not take advantage of it. And I already know it is stable, I have Prime95'd it for many hours at 232 FSB. I just got afraid when I started thinking about the PCI/PCI-e not locking and frying my 8600 GT or my harddrives.

Thanks all!

 

[nukemaster]

400mhz is 400mhz......
good to hear you have an answer....