FINALLY!!! 200 FSB on a A7N8X rev.1.04 board

Thanks to many of you in the forums, I finally managed to reach stable 200 FSB on my A7N8X-DLX. (rev 1.04).

Its been a long and somewhat tricky process. Basically it seems that these early revisions CAN do 200 FSB, but they need to be somewhat tinkered with to do it. Originally the board I have would top at a sad 185 no matter what.

Here is what I had to do to get to 200 FSB. None of these are my own discoveries or anything, this is all gathered from multiple posts here and at nforcershq.com.

1. Removing the NB heatsink, clearing off the pink bubble gum stuff that ASUS uses for thermal compund, and applying AS3 before putting it back on. Added a fan on top on the NB heatsink. Also added a small heatsink (and AS3) and small fan onto SB.
This helped me reach stable 192 FSB.

2. Increasing the AGP voltage slightly. (to 1.6) I found out that these boards have an AGP voltage issue at higher FSB, and indeed I experienced reboots at 195 and above. I knew I was on the right track now, because now I was able to boot into Windows at 200, but fail prime95 pretty quickly. Previosly, 200 at ANY multi would just lock up before the desktop.

3. The "pencil trick" as per here finally gave me stable 200 FSB. I chose this way over the 'proper' way because there is no way in hell I would be able to make any kind of connections to parts that are this small. I highly recommend the "pencil trick" because your chances of messing it up are minimal and the results are great.

I should mention that I really learned the importance of a good heatsink and power supply for this. None of this would be possible without an SLK-800U and Antec TruePower 430.

Thanks to everyone on here for all the great info/advice.

gj man

I should mention that I really learned the importance of a good heatsink and power supply for this. None of this would be possible without an SLK-800U and Antec TruePower 430.

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I had problems with the temps @ 200fsb and so far have it running with a case fan blowing staight onto the mother board from a bracket off back panel and no other mods.I am using a maze4 from dangerden with a 2500 @2450

Pencil trick can be messed up btw....but as long as u dont have ur board powered when ur penciling ur fine

Otherwise watch out for sparks haha

had to up the agp volatge 1 tenth and add a second fan for the bottom of the board...just rtv'd to the bottom of the case....motherboard temps now down 10 degrees even the cpu is 5 cooler with the fans blowing straight down onto the board

Well I had to re-do my "pencil trick", because I was working on improving the air flow of my case and stupidly aimed one of the fans right at the area where the pencilled resistor is located. OOPS... All the graphite was blown off and no more 200 FSB. So after re-doing it again and again, I actually managed to bring the SB voltage to 1.799V. This is higher than my original pencil application, which gave me about 1.699V. So now I am working on testing the higher FSB values.

Its been priming at 210 for a couple of hours. So far so good. May be these 1.xx boards are not junk after all. They just require some special care and attention in order to perform their best (just like women )


P.S. Mikeonatrike... of course you never pencil anything on a powered up mobo. Thats just common sense.

oops delete this

G|-|oST said:

P.S. Mikeonatrike... of course you never pencil anything on a powered up mobo. Thats just common sense.

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Of course i did not do it on purpose. That would have been just plain commmon stupidity. I just forgot to unplug the power.