NForce 3, high FSBs and Promise Fasttrack

[phobos]

Hello!

I'm going to buy a Shuttle AN50R and already got some Mushkin Level II sticks and an 3000+ here. My Mach I is also on its way ;)
Now my question:
Since no NF3 board has a locked pci bus I would like to get a FastTrak S150 TX2plus wich supports a 66MHz PCI bus. Is the promise also ATAPI compatible? Can I use my DVD-ROM and CD-Burner on that controller? I think it should be no problem but I just want to be sure.
What about the onboard sound? Is it OK at high FSBs? I only need the S/PDIF output to my AC3 receiver, that should work......I want Dolby :-D

Thank you and a happy new year!!

[DazzXP]

Yeah there are some NF3 boards with locked PCI buses.

[phobos]

:confused: I thought there is no NF3 with locked pci. This topic has been discussed so many times here.

[macci]

How do you know all NF3 boards are 'unlocked'?
I know there is an article showing that the SK8N doesn't seem to use fixed PCI mode but does that mean none of em uses it?
Been up to 351FSB with stock K8N NF3.
on truly PCI unlocked K8V (VIA) the same HDD crapped out at ~310FSB.
As far as I know the NF3 supports both fixed and non-fixed AGP/PCI bus.

[phobos]

Sorry for bugging you MickeyMouse, should have found it myself :)
But CD access without DMA is not really fun for everyday usage :(

@macci:
They don't have a locked PCI bus cuz the NF3 chipset doesn't support it. Only AGP is locked at 66MHZ.
MrIcee wrote somewhere something about it. I don't remeber who he mentioned ATM but sombody measured the PCI bus frequency out at several FSB speeds.
He also mentioned that Clockgen reads the PCI clock wrong. It always says 33MHz

[phobos]

but 350mhz fsb is more impressive with an unlocked bus so why ya complaining

:D

[JAMES]

Jason ....Macci is right there is some chance that the nforce3 has a pci lock....

Cause i did 352fsb on the k8nnxp with a 2x WD raptor SATA which is a very sensitive to PCI speeds...without any use of pci SATA card... but rather the onboard on SATA controllers...:D

But cant boot @ 225fsb from the bios.... i had to do the 352fsb from windows...

But the solution to boot from bios... is very simple... i got myself a pci SATA card... :D

So there is some chance that in windows the pci freq is locked while overclocking....