Re: A7V333 questions

crustybutthole wrote:
I have a machine with an A7V333 mb installed. Originally this had an
Athlon XP 1800+ installed with (2) sticks of 256K PC 2100 memory.
Board is an early version 1.01 with bios updated to 1017.

About 2 weeks ago I was given a used - but known to be in good working
condition - Athlon XP 2600+. I think it is a Barton because SiSoft
Sandra is reporting L2 cache = 512kB. As I understand, the Barton core
runs at 333mhz while the A7V333 only runs at 266mhz. Is this correct
so far?

I also recently found a good deal on Crucial 1 gig PC 2700 memory, so
I picked up two and decided to try to upgrade this older machine a
little. I installed the Athlon XP 2600+ and the 2 gig of PC 2700, and
tried to see if I could get it to work. MB is in jumper free mode, so
I went into bios and selected highest processor speed available (1917)
and all else to auto, which put the speed at 166/33 with a multiplier
of 11.5x. Machine posted, booted, and windows XP ran fine. However,
over the next week, the machine randomly froze up on about 4 seperate
occasions so I decided to do some web research and see if I could
tweek it a little and get this to stop happening.

A couple notes here: Asus probe was reporting CPU temp of 55 C which I
thought was a little high, but not dangerous. But SiSoft Sandra was
reporting CPU temp of 32-33 C. This mb does not support on die
temperature sensing, but uses a thermal sensor which I may not have
situated in the perfect location.

Also, I read about a possible misprint in the A7V333 manual that lists
the wrong settings for the ROMSIP jumper and suggested switching this
jumper from 1-2 to 2-3. I did this and it didn't seem to have any
effect at all.

Currently, I have the bios set to a speed of 165/33 with a multiplier
of 12x. Sandra confirms a FSB of 2x165 (330) and processor at 1.9GHz.
This has been runing for about 48 hours straight now with no issues.

So on to my questions. I'm kind of confused as to how this mb is
running at 330 when I thought that board version 1.01 could only run
at 266 - even with the bios upgrade. And if it can run at 333, then
why is it sometimes freezing up when set at 166/33 and 11.5x. What
would be the recommended settings for this board with XP2600+ and 2
gig of PC 2700 memory.

Thanks for reading and any advise that you might have to offer.

G


Chipsets can be overclocked. If a chipset is rated at FSB266,
it is possible it could run faster. To run faster, you need
a clock generator chip that allows going faster, and in the
case of the old motherboards, you also need the divider change
to happen at the right point.

According to this, the PCI clock divider switches to 1/5th at
160MHz. So both 165MHz and 166MHz, will yield PCI clocks
very close to 33MHz. And as a rule, AGP is just double the
PCI clock, and will be a safe value as well. PCI is good up to
37.5MHz, before there is a danger of corruption due to the
clock being too high. Some systems have run the PCI bus up to
40MHz, but in that case, no storage devices were getting their
timing from the PCI clock.

http://www.lostcircuits.com/motherboard/asus_a7v333/6.shtml

What the divider issue means, is there are "bad zones" for
clock values. For example, if you selected 159MHz, and the
above article claims the divider would be 4 in that case, then
PCI would be 39.75MHz. And that is too fast to be safe. But
selecting 160MHz for the processor, where the divider is 5,
gives a PCI of 32MHz, which is safe.

Since the CPU and memory clocks scale at the same time,
you should be careful you aren't overclocking the
memory. Say, for example, you select FSB266 and set the
memory to DDR266 (that is a 1:1 CPU:mem relationship).
Now, dial the CPU clock, from 133MHz to 166MHz. Not only
does the FSB change to FSB333 by doing that, but the memory
also changes to DDR333.

If you selected FSB266:DDR333 and then raised the FSB, the
memory would be at DDR333*(333/266)= DDR417. So you want
to dial down the memory, so that when the CPU clock is
raised, the memory stays in spec. The 1:1 setting
should do that for your PC2700 memory.

The lostcircuits article also mentions jumpers for
DDR voltage, but the default looks to be plenty to
make the memory work.

http://www.lostcircuits.com/motherboard/asus_a7v333/5.shtml


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