what PCI card is holding me back?

my system maxes out at about 1.6GHz and was wondering what PCI card is holding me back:

Santa Cruz Sound Card(dual AC97)
Belkin USB 2.0 card(NEC chipset)
Belkin LAN10/100(realtec)

... i don't much see the point of overclocking this rig if she don't get up to about 14x125 and she conks out at about 118 from 100 ... and ive set the memory to clock with the FSB so that is not holding me back ... and i don't think im ever going to be able to change the multiplier or voltage as from what ive read you have to do some tricky work with the pin connectors(if that is the case)

temps are generally less than of not average at 80 degrees fahrenheit (what is that? about 30 degrees celsius?)

 

I doubt your pci cards are holding you back. If you got the PCI bus locked at 66mhz (or is it 44? i forget) then that shouldn't be a problem when upping the FSB.

Voltage you can change in bios, provided your motherboard supports it. If you're running cool (which sounds like you are) I'd suggest upping the VCore about 0.05 and see if that improves stability.

 

the voltage is locked in my BIOS .. and there is some trick using pins to unlock the voltage by wrapping two VID pins together on the CPU and im not sure im confident doing something like that ... i had dled the manuel for my chip and i might wind up connecting the wrong pin ... however im reading this about a BIOS hack that might allow me to do it ... but if i still need to wrap those pins , i think this project is going to be left unfinished

 

hold on ... how do i tell if my PCI bus is locked or not? I dont see a setting in the BIOS and havent seen any such a setting in any BIOS tut ive seen

this is my PCI bus specs:

Expansion Slots
Five 32-bit Bus Mastering PCI slots (V2.2 compliant)
One AGP slot (2x, 4x mode)
Two 16-bit ISA slots
Expansion Slot Types
Five 32-bit Bus Mastering PCI
IDE Type
UDMA 33/66/100
IDE Description
Two independent channels for 4 IDE devices
Supports up to PIO mode 5 and Ultra DMA 33/66/100
http://www.soyousa.com/products/proddesc.php?id=12


i can adjust the PIO modes but i dont think that will do me any good ... i'm thinking that as you said about the lock on the PCI ... but if Im unintentially ocing the south bridge that may be causing me not to get past the initial BIOS screen(the screen before the POST) as that is when it detects my CDROM, HDDs ... but you probably already knew that(after it does that it just resets the BIOS automatically)

 

If it doesnt go past POST, a flag will be left off in the CMOS, which will cause it to boot with failsafe settings. Handy if the machine becomes unbootable and you dont know what happened.

With my ABIT board, you have the option to up the FSB and therefore OC the Northbridge but leave the PCI/AGP bus locked at their respective speeds. the PCI bus does not like to be overclocked at all.

Very misleading, the bios, when you select the Combo utility, it says "change CPU frequencies and voltage" but when you get in there, there is no option to do so!! How ridiculous. You can monitor the voltages, but not actually change them.

Well, you'll be wanting to up the VCore by about 0.05V and see if you can make it stable.

 

i checked with everest and when i up the FSB(host clock) the south bridge is being overclocked as well ... its stock speed is 33MHz and there is no way i want to doube the speed of that thing(unless i see documentation that it can handle 66MHz, which seems possible) ... i know both my FSB and memory are rated at 133 MHz so there shouldn't be a problem there(from 100MHz) ... it's just getting to the voltage and locking the PCI bus