Can tinkering with the HT Link on an AMD mobo adversely affect your GPU?

Greating OCN members

I recently tried OC'ing the ram and CPU on an Asus M5A78L-M LX motherboard, and (not knowing what I was doing), increased the HT Link frequency in the bios. Not long after, I started having problems where my graphics card would not be able to run at it's stock clock frequencies (an HD 4890). Doing some digging around on the 'net trying to find solutions, I came across some info that stated that the HT Link can be directly correlated to the graphics card.

This being Overclock.net, I figured someone here might be able to shed some light on this theory. If the HT Link is tampered with, can it adversely affect your GPU in the long run?

Thanks in advance!

Thank you That explains a lot now. Wish they made bios terms universal. I was using an AM3 Overclocking guide to try to OC a Phenom II X4 820 to 3.4GHz. In the guide they mention both HTT and HT Link, but me being new to this, I had no idea that those were actually two totally different things. Originally, I left the HT Link on "Auto", so whenever I nudged the HTT and CPU-NB, the HT Link number kept increasing. I didn't think anything of it or any harm would come from it until the GPU started acting up and I read that information. Everything's been set back to stock now since I suspected that was the problem.

Wish I could get a screenshot of how the bios on the mobo is set up. Would probably make it easier to explain what I did lol

Anyhow, I increased the HTT to 243 and left the multiplier @ x14; which gave me a "stable" 3.4GHz on the Phenom II X4 820. I kept the CPU-NB (Northbridge) @ around 2200 MHz. With the RAM (Corsair Dominator 1333MHz DDR3 2x 4GB), I increased the multiplier to 667MHz (it defaults to 1066MHz on this mobo, but has an XMP profile for 1333MHz. Since I don't have an Intel board, I had to manually set it to 1333MHz). Then I lowered the timing to CL7 from the default CL9. Everything *seemed* fine until the GPU started acting up. I went back into the bios and noticed that there was a separate entry for HT Link, and this was on AUTO and now overclocked itself and running at ~2400MHz. Then I came across a thread somewhere (can't find it now of course), where someone said the actual HT Link can govern communication between your GPU and CPU.... so I thought maybe I accidentally set this to a frequency too high and the GPU wasn't able to handle it.

There is a setting in there also for the PCI-e lane, but I never tinkered with that and left it on auto. For that entry, it doesn't actually show me what frequency it's running at (unless I select Manual). The card itself was never OC'ed. Don't know if it's at all possible that the PCI-e setting being on AUTO actually increased too while I was doing all of this, because it doesn't report it in the bios when it's on AUTO.
Edited by RevOne - 6/22/12 at 2:00pm