Athlon XP 2500 Woes

[Duxdude]

Okay,right to the point.
So, I installed my Athlon XP 2500+ (Barton,333 Mhz FSB) into my ASUS A7N8X. I am using an SK7-Thermalright all-copper heatsink and a Thermaltake Smartfan II (80MM). I am a bit of a newbie when it comes to installing CPU's but I believe I seated everything right. I applied Antec Silver thermal compound (no,it is not Artic Silver III...but still).

So, I turn on my machine. Everything powers up fine. My machine detects the processor as an Athlon XP 1100 Mhz. Okay,I realize that most mo-bo's don't get the speed right from the get-go. So I go into the BIOS and full around with the settings. Me being me and reading stuff I thought I should mess around with voltages (RAM and CPU) and of course multipliers. So I fooled around and got weird combinations and resulting speeds of things like 677 mhz, 933mhz, and 1600 Mhz. Well, once at 1600 Mhz I thought I would try to let it boot up into OS. No go,it would feeze about 4 seconds upon boot up. Clear C-MOS memory and start again. This time I got my machine at 1900 mhz (RAM frequency of 133 x 11 Multiplier). Worked for about 5 minutes,then freeze and hard boot.

Again,clear C-MOS and go back. I am currently running at the default settings of 1100 Mhz as I type this.

What the hell do I have to do to get this machine running stable at at least it's base frequency of 1.833 Ghz? I was actually hoping to overclock to at least 2.0 Ghz (I have read people can get the barton up 2.4 ghz). Did I perphaps not seat the heatsink correctly? I believe this crashes are due to over-heating. Basically I would really like to at least get my system running at stock clock speed. If anyone could list any specific settings (multipliers,voltages,etc) who have this board/CPU combo or are just generally good with this,that would be great. Any other advice would be grateful. Below are system specs:

CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2500+ (Barton Core, 333 Mhz FSB)
Heatsink: Thermalright SK-7 (all copper)
Fan: Thermaltake Smartfan II,80MM, 4800 RPM (at max)
Thermal Paste: Antec Silver
MO-BO: ASUS A7N8X Deluxe(Revision 2.0)
RAM: GEiL Dual Channell Golden Dragon, PC 3200, 512MB(2x256)
Power Supply: ATX 350 Wat
Video Card: ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
OS: Windows Server 2003, Enterprise
HD: Samsung 40GB, 7200 RPM

Current Temps:
CPU: 37C/98F
Mo-Bo:32C/89F

anything else is probably irrelevant. All help and insight is welcome

[vass0922]

FSB should be at 166
Multiplier at 11x

I don't have the voltages on hand with me at the moment

I also have the 2500+ I'm at 1.83 ghz


--- edit ----
According to Sandra the core voltage is 1.62V

Hope it helps!

Don't worry about OC'ing it until you get it up and stable and you get a safe point where you know everything works. Beat it up a little bit make sure nothing is gonna break under a heavy load.. then worry about that part

Maybe even consider joining our FAD team
www.timodc.com


Welcome to TechIMO

[Bruneau]

I'd underclock it and do a Windows Repair Trick (load windows over top of itself).

[Bruneau]

Then jack it up.

[cruiserlck]

I got the same mobo & processor. On the motherboard there is a jumper just to the left of the northbridge chip , in your motherboard manual it tells about it at the bottom of page 21. It's supposed to be set on 333/266 fsb as default but mine come set on 200 fsb . I had the same problem you do. Set that jumper to 1 & 2 (top 2 pins) and it should straighten it out.

stock speed bios settings are :

FSB=166
Multiplier=11
Vcore voltage=1.650 (default)

Hope this helps.

BTW , welcome to TechIMO!

[Duxdude]

Okay,I just looked on my mo-bo and the jumper settings are (and were by default) set to the 1&2 pins. So,that was not the problem. I've been fooling around just with Fequency's (keeping the multiplier at the default of 11x) and my system will constantly just shut down after about 2 seconds upon start-up. Even using the correct mutliplier and frequency of 11x166 the BIOS still show the processor coming up as 1100 MHz (and my RAM frequency as 100 mhz....). And then my board will tell me the CPU failed due to system overclocking. But once I set the frequency back down to 100 mhz it will run fine. Any more ideas?

[Bob The Great]

ok reset the bios via the reset cmos jumper thingy (I have a funny story about that, but I'll save that for later). Now switch your RAM to different slots. If you have multple sticks it doesn't matter if one of them ends up in a slot that the old was in origianlly, just so none of them are in there original places. Now go into the bios and go to where you change the cpu settings. Now raise the CPU to 166FSB and the mem to 133 (i'm assuming its pc-2100, if not raise it to the appropriate value for the ram). Now put the multipliers to 11.

Now save settings and restart. As soon as it starts go into bios and check the health status. Watch the CPU temp and make sure its not overheating. If it doesn't you should be good to go.

To explain what just happend would be impossible for me to do. I know that problem though, it seems to occure with new mobos that change fsb's and multi's in the bios instead of on the board like older mobo's. In my experience this exact problem occurs way to often when people piece machines together. I'm not sure of the cause but symptoms are the computer acting like your overclocking it. If you switch the ram around and reset the bios, then first off change the fsb and multipliers to the right setting the problem usually goes away and you have your correct speed.

[Bruneau]

Oh come on Bob. Please explain... heheh

Somtimes too, you have to unplug the power supply for a minute to change those onboard jumpers and make it take hold.

[Bob The Great]

I have no clue what happens?? Its strange, I just know how to fix it. I've had that problem with 3 of my mobos that I've forgotten to set the FSB correctly on, and two of my friends had that problem and I walked them through. Its just weird...oui, computers are weird.