A question has arisen about the PCI ratios on nForce2 boards. Appears that you can futz with AGP but not PCI speeds.
Evan Lieb over at Anandtech.com asked about this. Three of the manufacturers (Abit, Asus, Chaintech) said that the PCI bus is locked at 33MHz no matter what you do with it. One (Epox) hasn’t yet provided an answer.
Two (Leadtek, MSI) indicated that the PCI speed was not locked at 33MHz, but they indicated neither in the article nor in their manuals just how the PCI speed was determined in their machines. In these case, we don’t know what high-end PCI divisors are available and when they kick in. If you want to run at 200MHz+ FSB, this is something you want to know before you buy the board.
The Leadtek does provide a utility that gives you PCI speed, but that does require someone who has the board to report what they find.
Lack of Choice
From this, there’s a disturbing lack of choice among the nForce2 boards for overclockers. You either get 33MHz, and that’s that, or you get an overclocked PCI speed (and we don’t know if a /6 divisor is supported).
What you want is choice. Ideally, you should have the option to either lock at 33MHz, or run a bit more than that and overclock your PCI components a bit to improve performance if that makes sense in your particular situation.
No board out there gives you that option, yet.
Might be worth waiting a bit for one that does.
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