Athlon XP 2200+ / Which motherboard will enable 5.5x-20x?

Hi there,

I'm the proud owner of an Athlon XP 2200+, which, sadly -- uses a high multiplier. My goal is to reach a 200MHz (400MHz DDR) front side bus without modding the CPU in any way, and without overclocking the CPU itself. To reach this FSB will require a 9x multiplier, which I'm told is not possible with this chip as only 13x and higher multipliers are available. I'm also told that motherboards exist that can unlock this CPU all the way down to 5.5x or so. That's what I'm looking for today and I'm hoping you can give me your kind advice as to what I should buy.

These are characteristics I'm looking for. A bit of wiggle room is tolerable:

1) Passively cooled northbridge
2) around $100 or so, even less is better
3) Will unlock an old-school Athlon XP 2200+ below 12.5/13x.

I have one stick of Samsung PC3200 DDR SDRAM, the DTL variety.

Any advice you can give me is very very welcome. Thank you.

the abit nf7-s and epox rda+...but those are over $100. the new gigabyte N400 (single channel memory only) is supposed to be very good....go to www.anandtech.com and see the review. soltek has one also. not sure if the gigbayte and soltek bds use all multi's...you could always use the www.ocinside.de method. it works. search around the forums.

All the Nforce2 mobo's unlock them.
Asus, Abit, Gigabyte...

your default clock is like 1800 so to run 200FSB you'd need a 9x multiplier which may or may not work. i'm not good with what multi's are available on what CPU's.

why do you have a goal of 200FSB? if it's for gaming performance than what graphics card are you running. if you don't have an up to par GPU than all that FSB won't matter much.

case and point, my system. i'm running at 2Ghz with over 170FSB. my graphics card is a Radeon 7500. at the stock clock speed i get a 4300 in 3d mark 2k1se (eww i know shush). with my overclock and my card OC'd to 260/220 i get 4700 in the same test. so even with a huge amount of difference in bandwidth i don't get a significant gain in 3d performance. so obviously, like i really needed 3dmark to tell me, my graphics card is the bottleneck in my system not my memory.

For DivX/XviD encoding, high front side bus speeds/memory speeds are quite useful.

oh i see. well if you want to be realistic that CPU shouldn't have a problem with a bit of an OC. i'd shoot for like 180's 190's with good memory because without overclocking it alot your going to have to run your multi into the dirt.

you may not want to hear this but the best plan of attack would prolly be to get a CPU that can take a large OC. you can get JIUHB DUT3C's and DLT3C's for like $70. a DLT3C should be able to do 2.3 Ghz on air fairly easily. so even if you shot for 2.2Ghz you could hit 220FSB at a 10 multi or 200FSB at 11x.