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Overclock PCI-E RAID card

664 Views 8 Replies 5 Participants Last post by  PizzaMan, 
A
Hello all,

As we know, overclocking can offer more bang for your buck. Wanting to make my PC faster I was eventually introduced for the first time to RAID cards and Striping etc.. etc.. and the read speeds you can gain from this.

Now I wont try and cover up the fact I'm an overclocking noob. so forgive me if in the future I cause you to write 'LOL' into your own face with a screwdriver in an attempt to stop laughing at me.

So you know what level you're working at, I did try to SLI two XFX 8800 GTX XXX with a 200w power supply. turns out you can't, who knew ^_^

anyway...

Looking at RAID controllers with say 800mhz, or 1.2 GHZ CPU and up to 4GB of ECC RAM etc... Can you overclock them? in my head (welcome to noobvill) they are a PCI-E card like a graphics card and have a CPU and RAM soooooooo easy right?

help!

if its helpful I'm running:
MSI x38 diamond MB
3GB DDR3 ram
E8400 wolfdale CPU
XFX 8800GTX XXX SLI
Enermax Revolution 85+ 1050W PSU
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MrLinky
Quote:


Originally Posted by Acid2k

So forgive me if in the future I cause you to write 'LOL' into your own face with a screwdriver in an attempt to stop laughing at me.

Graphic... but metal nontheless!

So if i understand your question correctly, you are wondering if its possible to overclock the raid card and/or the pci/pic-e slot? If so, the answer is yes, you can oc the pci-e slot, but you should never do it unless you're hitting a bclk wall for your cpu. Its safe to go 2 or 3 mhz over the stock speed, but beyond that you run the very real risk of burning out pci slots and corrupting GPUs and HDDs with prolonged use.

And theres a good possibility that overclocking a raid card will not increase performance.
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A
Wow, didn't know you could overclock the PCI-E slot its self. thanks for that.
So you cant treat the RAID card like you would a graphics card and bump up the CPU and/or RAM?
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MrLinky
Quote:


Originally Posted by Acid2k

So you cant treat the RAID card like you would a graphics card and bump up the CPU and/or RAM?

If you mean overclock like upping a cpu multiplier or changing ram ratio, then no, you can't. If you mean force the raid card to run faster by increasing it's pci-e slot's frequency, then in theroy it should work. I say in theroy because raid cards were never designed to be overclocked and pci-e overclocking is a very dangerous buisness... will little or no benifit.

I guess if you have an old rig you never use and dont mind putting in harm's way, it'd be a fun experiment. But im pretty sure that even if you succesfully oc your raid card, that speeds wont improve. The I/O bottleneck of ANY computer is the HDD, even SSDs. You will see huge disk read/write improvments if you short-stroke your hdds (google "hdd short-stroking") or buy a ssd.

Hope that answers your question!
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A
Yeah, I couldn't believe it when I started to seriously get into computers. It seemed so stupid for me to overclock my CPU from 3ghz to 4ghz, and SLI two XFX 8800GTX XXX, but have a HDD with a 40mbs read time.

That's what got me on this RAID card business in the first place. Now I got 4 HDDs, not because I can fill 2Tb of space, but I'm going to RAID0. ^_^ yeah, RAID 0 is risky, but thats the joy of pushing a system.

My dream is to get 14 Seagate Savvio 10.2 10000rpm SAS drives in RAID. hehehe. I'm thinking of getting the Areca ARC-1680ix-8. That damn RAID card has its ownIntel Dual Core 1.2Ghz CPU and 4GB RAM! my PC "only" runs 3GB RAM lol. good thing with 2.5 HDD, you can fit two into a 3.5" slot
can you say "hot and heavy"
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I
I think that's a bit much. Perhaps 2 640gb WD Blacks will be cheaper and easier to manage.
With the 640's in raid, you could get about 200mb/s sequential read.
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D3FiN3 SiN
Quote:


Originally Posted by Acid2k
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Wow, didn't know you could overclock the PCI-E slot its self. thanks for that.
So you cant treat the RAID card like you would a graphics card and bump up the CPU and/or RAM?

No, that would be a really bad idea, complete and utter destruction.
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A
Well, Seagate Savvio 36GB 10000RPM SAS drives are starting to flood the second hand market now the new 15000 RPM ones are out and about. however 15krpm drives need more cooling so I wont use them. you can pick 2nd hand 10k drives up from just over $35 or £22. I'm going to spread buying the drives over a year or so.

Thanks for your help guys.
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PizzaMan
I would not recommend OCing your raid card or your PCI bus too much unless you like having corrupted OS and reformatting all the time. This is what typically happens when the PCI bus is raised to high.
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