Musical hardware

[Scoofy12]

At last, thanks to LAURENU2's generosity, after some delay (thanks to an RMA and my schedule), my new give-a-way cruncher has been assembled. I picked up an MSI K7N2 Delta (nForce2), and with it an XP2800 and put it together with the rest of the new gear. So the new cruncher is now running FAD with a rating of 193. So victory has been declared there. Plus with this new infusion of parts, I've probably got enough to build another cruncher soon.

w00t!

Now the question.
So now I'm left with a spare Sempron 2400. I thought I might use it as an upgrade for my current XP2100. The current thought on whether this is feasible is "maybe". The problem is that the CPU is designed for a 166 MHz FSB, but the board (an Epox 8KHA with via KT266 chipset) is designed for 133 or 100 FSB and RAM (and my ram is only PC2100 or DDR266). Fortunately the board is very tweakable, and supports running the RAM and FSB asynchronously (at a 1.33/1 ratio) and setting the FSB arbitrarily. so i've cranked the FSB now up to 150 and the RAM is at about 112, putting the CPU at about 1500MHz.

so if you've waded through that, 2 questions:
1). I ran the FSB up to almost 166 doing this and the MB booted, but the USB mouse didn't work when i did this. does running the FSB up like this also increase the AGP/PCI/other peripheral bus speeds as well?

2) assuming i can get the bus up to nearly 166, which would be better: the XP2100 at 1733MHz with a 133MHz bus and 133MHz RAM, or the Sempron 2400 at 1660MHz with a 166MHz bus and 125MHz ram? I can find this out probably by testing with FAD, but opinions are welcome.

also note that unlocking the multiplier by making the CPU appear as a mobile is probably out since the chipset is too old.

opinions?

[PS2pcGAMER]

To answer the number 1:

I had a KT266 chipset board, but don't remember much about it.

The PCI/AGP bus goes up along with the FSB. I am pretty sure that chipset has dividers, so when the FSB is 100, it divides it by 3 to get 33.3mhz for the PCI bus. Same thing for when the bus is at 133, the divider would be 4. It usually does this automatically for those speeds. However, when you up it to 166, you might have to manually set the PCI divider to 5 (166/5~=33mhz). I am going to guess that there is a 5 divider because it is an epox board and they are known for having decent/good/great overclocking features.

As far as number 2, I have no idea. I am not sure what kind of hit the memory divider will have on performence.

I am kind of interested to see if it will work with a sempron, because I am the same situation as you as far as motherboard/ram, so it would be cool to see what CPU I could upgrade to.

[Scoofy12]

interesting, i dont remember seeing a PCI divider, but i'll look for that.

preliminary results. right now i have the thing running at 150 FSB, 1500 CPU MHz, 112RAM MHz. it ran FAD all night and seems no worse for wear right now (i'm writing this on it). it posted FAD ratings of just over 160, compared with about 180 for the XP2100 at 1733MHz and 140 for the sempron at 1330MHz (133FSB with 133MHz RAM). tonight i'll bump it higher and look for a PCI divider.

it seems to me that running the PCI/AGP/etc busses at higher-than-spec speeds should not permanently damage the things attached to them (unless they overheat), right? anyone know differently?

[Thor]

To my knowledgle , Epox boards don't have many overclock features (but is stable as hell) in the BIOS. I don't belive that it has a seperate divider Option , my 8K3a+ did't have any either(altough there might be a MOD Bios for it, which has these options).

Usually if the AGP/ PCI clock is higher than standart(+x), certain subsytems will stop working. If I remember right, it usually starts with the dik controller, then with the HD controllers and so on.

I would go with stability, leave the XP2100 on the board, get a very cheap board for FSB 166 (maybe someone still has one?), get some cheap PC2700 RAM and put the Sempron on.

Thats less hassle and a system which is more stable.

Usually you get better speeds with a system were the FSB for CPU nd RAM is the same.. (e.g my XP3200 runs usually at FSB200, now at 220 together with the RAM, I'll try more in the wintertime ;-) )


That's how I would do it...


Greets Thor

[Scoofy12]

@Thor: I don't know about other Epox boards as i've never owed any other than this one, but this one has great O/C features. I've heard this was a new thing pretty different from their previous designs, so maybe the OC stuff was new too. unfortunately, no PCI divider option though. i've never even heard of a mobo having that but it would be pretty cool. where might i look to find a modded BIOS?

and actually your suggestion of getting the cheap stuff was what I was doing in the first place; It just so happened that the cheap mobo I picked up came with its own processor :) I really don't need another motherboard; I've already got 2 that i'm not currently using, including an MSI one that's nearly identical to this Epox (same chipset, but fewer clock features). This one is in my main home machine and has been quite stable at 150FSB with the exception that the USB mouse occasionally fails to come up when it boots. I think I'm going to put XP2100 in the MSI board and put it in my main home machine, leave the sempron in this Epox board with a 256 stick of PC2700 ram I have, and then I can run it as a dedicated cruncher, so if it crashes all I lose is a few WUs. That way i can run it without a video card or mouse or keyboard and maybe even without a HD and as long as the ethernet card can keep up, i can crank the FSB as high as it will go and still boot :)