GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3 - PCH Voltage Setting

[agblixt]

I have a GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3 with a 120GB Corsair Force 3 SSD and like so many others with a Sandforce based SSD I am having all kinds of stability issues.

One of the recommended work arounds to help improve stability is to increase the PCH voltage to 1.15v. I have looked everywhere through the bios but cannot find a setting for PCH Core voltage. My first thought was the gigabyte may refer to this as something else but I can't find reference to this anywhere. I have googled and searched the forums but don't seem to be able to find anyone else with a similar issue. I have updated the firmware to F9.


I would really appreciate it if someone was able to point me in the right direction.

System specs:

Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3
Intel Core i5 2500K
Corsair Vengeance DDR3 8GB
Corsair 120GB Force 3 Series
MSI Radeon HD6850 Cyclone Power Edition OC
Seasonic X-650 80Plus Gold 650W
Windows 7 x64

Thanks.

[TigetLi]

Hello,

See page 43 of your manual. I believe that they are calling it "Graphics Core" with a a couple of sub-headings below that activate once you come out of Auto voltage setting.

PCH isn't tied to the vcore or PLL. PCH controls I/O ports and slots. These includes Graphic cards and very likely your SSD. People with many HDD's or using multiple video cards might need to set PCH Voltage at 1.20v if they overclock to high multipliers and are using SLI/Crossfire, to avoid crashes in the video driver, just like raising VTT is necessary for 4 sticks of RAM and high ram clocks.

Compare your Graphics Core voltage in BIOS against the GPU voltage of your 6850 Video card. Then raise Graphics Core settings in incriments  to 1,15V in BIOS to see what it does to your SSD and 6850. Make sure that you are using the latest BIOS for your motherboard.

Regards,

[agblixt]

Hi TigetLi,

Thanks for the info, I have had another look in manual at the pages you recommended (and the rest of the manual) but from other information that I have found I am not sure that adjusting the Graphics Core voltage will have the desired result. From other research I have done I believe the "Graphics Core" setting is the voltage for the onboard video controller. I have tried setting some of the voltage manually and not using the auto setting but it does not seem to activate any other sub heading.

I have also emailed technical support so hopefully they will come back with some information and I will let you know how it turns out.

Thanks again for your help

Regards,

Aaron.

[TigetLi]

Hello Aaron,

Found this for you at this location (look under Intel processors): http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/printpage/Understanding-All-Voltage-Configurations-from-the-Motherboard/995

VAXG: Voltage used by the video controller embedded inside the CPU, on CPUs that have this component. This option can be called by names such as “Graphics Core,” “GFX Voltage,” “IGP Voltage,” “IGD Voltage,” and “VAXG Voltage.”

Your motherboard has onboard Graphics. Your research is correct. the BIOS "Graphics Core" option only affect the onboard graphics controller in your CPU

Regards,