USEFUL INFO FOR SOME 875 problems i had (and solved)

Question

PROBLEM ONE:
AGP/PCI NOT LOCKING, fix:
this problem was common amongst us 875 owners. the agp/pci setting would not lock when set to 66/33. some of us used clockgen to patch this. well there is a strange fix. to lock it a t 66/33 ( NO MATTER WHAT SETTINGS YOU USE) here is what you do. go into "IDE configuration" set enable Serial ATA to yes. now go back to your agp/pci setings. you will now only have three choices to choose from, instead of selecting in increments, choose 66/33. this works whether or not your have a sata drive or not and does not effect your HD setup. problem solved.
PROBLEM TWO:
AGP CARD CRASHES TO DESKTOP mainly with (3dmark 2001 and dx games), fix:
the problem was caused by two factors. the main issue was heat from the core. it didn't matter whether my card was overclocked or not, i would still freeze or kick me to the desktop.  adding two more fans, one laying on the backside of the core, and the other a zalman 90mm pci slot fan positioned over my agp card. if you touch your core (both ati and nvidia, and it is too hot to touch, then you need better cooling for your card, and it will cause this problem. once the cooling was added i havent hade the problem since. note that i already had an iceberq4 fan for my video card. the other factor was my mem volt settings. if my ram voltage is set to 2.7, it would crash eventually, or freeze(even browsing web). once it was set to 2.6 i have not had any problems at all. 2.7 seems to be to high for my ram.
PROBLEM THREE:
HIGH OVERCLOCK while maintaining decent mem bandwidth, fix:
look at my sig. i didnt like running a 5:4 ratio because my ram frequency gets decreased in the process. i could not overclock high enough for my ram to reach 400mhz @ 333 setting. i could reach  370-380 mhz ram freq and 3.2 ghz at 5:4. my solution is overclock @ 1:1 without PAT enabled. i can overclock to my 2.8 to 3.2 (228 FSB, rock solid) and get sandra mem scores over 5000. at 5:4 i only would get 4700.
conclusion, every problem i have had with my board has seem to slowly fade away. with experimentation and other great post on this board i feel i am running the perfect computer. very happy at this point with my product. i hope this post will help others.

Answer 1

I've never had my agp/pci clock overclocked. Mine has always stayed at 66/33 no matter what I did. I have a Sata Raid 0 on ICH5R and maybe that's what's holding the bus speed in place like Medafor said. I do still have my graphic card overclocked everytime I choose Fast or above. I have a 9700 pro which runs at 325 gpu and 310 Ram and If I choose anything else than slow it overclocks to 344/324 regardless of the same 66/33 agp/pci bus. I checked in more that one utility software. This annoys me a lot because I get artifacts when on some 3d apps (games) if the graphic card is Ovclk, so I have to set things to slow and I loose PAT which is the reason I bought a 875 instead of a 865. I'm getting furious because I payed for something that is denyed to me just because msi decided to "cheat" on benchmarks overclocking other peoples hardware. Do you think there's any way of turning off this "feature"?
Also I understand that a raid 0 setup only works with a given controler. If I change for another Mobo with the same ICH5R will I be able to rebuild the raid without loss of data?
Thanks for your help in advance