GA-7N400-L and Athlon 2600+ bios issues

G'day there

My brother and I just bought an Athlon 2600+ CPU and a GA-7N400-L motherboard to upgrade from an ageing waste of space, and am finding the bios remarkably difficult to navigate compared to my 3200+ that I just installed into an earlier Gigabyte board.

I have left the CLK_SW in the OFF position (100MHZ which the book recommends for 200MHz CPU's) and the CLK_RATIO in Auto X X X X X X

Everything else was left as is, and booted up ok (Windows XP Home, genuine). On startup, the Bios says the chip is an Athlon ~1150MHz, and when I go into Control Panel > System under General Information the System says:

AMD Athlon (tm) (nothing else here where my other PC says 3200+, is there soemthing wrong here?)
1.15Ghz (where my other PC says 2.20GHz - I believe the 2600+ chip should be at 2.08GHz?)
512MB RAM

I do understand that the internal speeds of the Athlon chips are different to the rating, but this is heaps slow. Benchmarking it falls far short of the 2600+ standards.

We have Gigabyte EasyTune4 which tells me the chip is running at a CPU multiplier of 11.5x, and System Bus at 100MHz, resulting frequency of 1151.61MHz (hence the 1.15Ghz speed no doubt). The system bus speed is Tune-able, but the CPU mulitplier is locked. Currently on EasyTune4 its on the slowest system bus speed that i can select as a default.

Other things: AGP running at 40 (whatever that means), PCI at 20, DRAM at 200.

What other information is needed, and how do I get the chip up to at least running like normal 2600+ chips? Can I just take the System Bus up to 175MHz for 2012.50 resulting speed?

Some other stats:
VCoreA + 1.720V
+3.3V + 3.240V
+5V + 5.050V
+12V + 11.980V

Temp:
System 37C / 98F
CPU A 54C / 127F

This motherboard seemed to be great in the advertising but is not one for the newbies like us. Well, I didn't feel like a newbie till i got to this board at any rate.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Cheers... Tim

Ok, some advice from a friend from a different source has cured the problem, the 2600+ is not a 200MHz CPU, but rather a 266MHz CPU, curse reading incorrect material online to stuff me around.

Thanks for anyone who read.

Tim

There a few different types of 2600+ one is the Barton Core which runs at 1.9 GHZ with 512KB cache and FSB 333MHZ and two different Thoroughbred Cores One at 266MHZFSB and One at 333mhz these only have 256k level 2 cache, the barton has 512K.

What u need to do is set the FSB to either 133 or 166 inyour bios i had the same problem as well as recognising as 1150mhz.

Zantetsuken,

You should check your manual, page 16 I think, describes the location and purpose of the fsb switch which is between the agp slot and the northbridge, set this to on or auto, reboot and go into cmos and load optimized defaults and reboot, that should fix you up..

Additionally you and your brother may want to have a look at this Gigabyte New Users Guide there is alot of good info in there about the giga nforce2 boards.

After re reading your last paragraph, seriously check that guide and you will be ok..

Laterz,
3sixes -aka- dafan"MOM"man

3sixes said:

Zantetsuken,

You should check your manual, page 16 I think, describes the location and purpose of the fsb switch which is between the agp slot and the northbridge, set this to on or auto, reboot and go into cmos and load optimized defaults and reboot, that should fix you up..

Click to expand...

This was the eventual cure, yeah. The reason I had left that switch off was that the menual expressed to leave it off for 200MHz CPUs which I read on some page I found thru google that this chip was - there begins the start of my problems. That switch (and one other small BIOS thing i changed back to what it was) fixed all.

Thanks for your replies!

Tim