Help! a7n8x AGP Problem

Hi, guys

I just bought a refurbished a7n8x board from newegg. The problem is that the AGP frequency seems to be locked. No matter how I adjust the frequency from 50M-90M, I always get the same 3dmark score - around 2450, and the clock information of the video card shown in 3dmark is always (core)324M/(memory)202M, by the way, my video card is ATI 9600. I don't know if this is a problem or not, but I'm really ****ed off, should I RMA the board back to newegg?

Thanks very much.

Did a lot research yesterday. Find out increase AGP frequency actully does very little help to 3DMark score, and when I increased AGP frequency to 100M, video card did black out. Guess the board is ok, for 50 bucks, it's a good deal. I also bought a new athlon xp 2500 with the board, but unfortunately, it is locked. I tried to increase FSB to 200M yesterday, but Windows XP won't boot, it says some file is damaged. Anybody has luck to overclocks xp2500 to 200M FSB with this board?

Dude

.... First off leave the AGP frequency at 66MHz. Don't touch it. This is the PCI and AGP bus speed and has no effect on the performance of your system. If you push it higher the whole mainboard becomes unstable.

Your RAM most likely cannot achieve 200MHz. Even though it's (Samsung?) it will not reach 200MHz without some serious overvolting.

Most locked Bartons will do 2200MHz easily on good air cooling and default voltage. What cooling you got?

I'm using Thermalright ALX-800. I also bought a Vantec Tornado 84.1 CFM case fan from case-mode.com - I know it's too aloud, I just hope Asus Q-Fan will cure that problem for me. But after I received the fan, I found out that the 12V CPU fan connector only have one line attached to detect fan speed, so Q-Fan can not have control on it, and it is proved to be too aloud for me to tolerate, I removed one of my case fan to replace it. I will try to get a side resistance to modify the fan so I can control the speed.

My RAM is not good enough, one is Kingston 256M DDR 2100, the other is Samsung 256M DDR 2700. I'm runing them at 166M FSB without problem. When I increased FSB to 200M I did set CPU/Memroy frequency ration to 83%, so the memory will still be running at 166M FSB, but it didn't work out. Guess I will wait for a good FAR PC2700 ram and modify the cooling fan, then try to overclock it again.

Thanks

Radlinker is a good program for ocing my ATI video card. You can do a search in google and find the website. Your PCI video frequency does nothing for you in regards to performance increase. Just set it at 66 Mhz. Also, find some good memory if you want to get 200 X 11. This board will give you 2.2 Ghz easy if you have a Barton XP2500. But single channel memory is all you will get unless you have high performance memory.

here is a link to the radlinker site

i use it too, and it's really neat, you can link some game to startup using a higher clockrate, that way if it ends up being too high, you will get 'dropped" back to your desktop at BIOS-boot settings, so you don't have to leave windows to find a nice overclock