CPU Speed lolocaust extravaganza

Originally Posted by Merv Burger

After some poking around today, I finally solved the mystery of why my processor was working at a speed far slower than it should have been.

It turns out I had my CPU FSB set to 100Mhz instead of 133MHz, thus making my Athlon 1800+ run at 1.15GHz instead of 1.53GHz.

So, I set the jumpers on my motherboard so that the FSB is running at 133MHz. However, after I did that, I could not boot into Windows. Almost as soon as the splash screen shows up, it will blue screen, displaying what appears to me as a random STOP error (they were different every time, from 0x0000008E, 0x0000007B to 0x00000005. Those just appear entirely random to me, considering Micrsoft says somewhat different things for all of them.) Completely ignoring these BSOD's, I try my Ubuntu 5.10 live-cd, to no avail. when I try to boot it, it would stay at decrompressing the kernel, or giving an immediate kernel panic.

I tried flashing the BIOS (even though the manual says it fully supports my CPU,) and that did nothing noticable.

When I put the FSB back to 100Mhz, everything acted as it should, just with the processor not running at it's max speed.

So, how would it be possible for me to keep my motherboard running at 133MHz, yet be able to actually use my computer?

Note- yes, I did take out sticks of RAM and swapped them out to see if it was just some weird memory issue, to my knowlege, it isn't.

It also isn't a heat issue, the case is sitting wide open,and the power supply is sitting on top of the case.

CPU: AMD Athlon 1800+
Motherboard: Soyo K7VTA Pro V1.0 (I just call it the POS-1)

I didnt notice if you tried booting from a boot disk or not... If you are changing the FSB and trying to run windows off of your hard drive, you might have problems.

Also, although mobo's "support" stuff, POS mobos are very picky and quirky. So you might be screwed.

Other than that, my initial reaction is memory issues. Your memory timings might need to be changed now that the FSB is faster. I don't know much about tweaking memory, except that higher numbers are generally easier on the memory than lower numbers (ie. 3-3-3-6 is VERY tight timings, and 3-5-5-6 is loose). So you might try to custom time your memory a bit in your BIOS.

Sorry for the horrid help .

Jam it back in, in the dark.