I posted this over at the AMDMB forums too, and I figured the good folks here might have some ideas or suggestions as well....
My 1700+ died last week, and rather than replace it with another Socket A cpu, I picked up a K8N and a Sempron 3000+. The part # on the CPU indicated that it was a 90nm SOI cpu, so I figured I should have a decent shot at oc'ing it a bit.
I'm not sure if I've got a dud CPU, flaky mobo, or am just a victim of a colossally bad BIOS from Asus. To start with, I was able to boot up at stock speeds no trouble, and temps were in the low 30s under load, so things were looking OK. However, even adding 5 mhz to the fsb was enough to cause trouble. If it even posted, it would crash in windows after about 5 minutes.
I noticed one time that the post screen was showing some visual corruption...parts of letters missing etc. When it booted to windows I checked the AGP speed with the nvidia system util, and it was indicating 78mhz on the AGP bus. Not good.
I went into the BIOS, and the AGP speed was indeed set to 66, so WTF? On a hunch, I bumped it up to 67, and voila! 66mhz bus speed. Real nice. Part of the problem solved I guess.
Now on to the overclocking...I can boot into windows at up to 260 FSB (the highest I've tried) with HTT at 3x and my memory at 333. The trouble is, no matter what FSB I've got it at, I can't seem to get it stable enough to run Prime95. Now, I don't know if this is a big deal or not. Games run fine, the machine runs 24x7 without falling over, it just won't run Prime95. To clarify, it won't run Prime at *any* bus speed over 200, even if the CPU multiplier is lowered. I've tried adding a bit of voltage (up to 1.6v) and it still doesn't make any difference.
I've seen posts of people saying they can run 285+ on this board, and I'm a bit dissappointed so far...but I don't know if the board or the CPU is the culprit. If I could just put the Prime95 issue out of my mind, I'd likely be happy
Here's what I've got:
Asus K8N (1007.4 BIOS...have tried 1006 as well)
Retail Sempron 3000+
512 Corsair XMS 3200
Sparkle 300W PS (also tried a Sparkle 350, no difference)
Radeon 9800
Seagate 120GB
TB Santa Cruz
Hauppage 401
Mitsumi/NEC 1300A DVDRW
Any ideas or suggestions? I can probably still return or exchance the mobo...but at this point I don't know if I've got a defective board, CPU that just isn't up to it, or simply a ****-poor BIOS.
My 1700+ died last week, and rather than replace it with another Socket A cpu, I picked up a K8N and a Sempron 3000+. The part # on the CPU indicated that it was a 90nm SOI cpu, so I figured I should have a decent shot at oc'ing it a bit.
I'm not sure if I've got a dud CPU, flaky mobo, or am just a victim of a colossally bad BIOS from Asus. To start with, I was able to boot up at stock speeds no trouble, and temps were in the low 30s under load, so things were looking OK. However, even adding 5 mhz to the fsb was enough to cause trouble. If it even posted, it would crash in windows after about 5 minutes.
I noticed one time that the post screen was showing some visual corruption...parts of letters missing etc. When it booted to windows I checked the AGP speed with the nvidia system util, and it was indicating 78mhz on the AGP bus. Not good.
I went into the BIOS, and the AGP speed was indeed set to 66, so WTF? On a hunch, I bumped it up to 67, and voila! 66mhz bus speed. Real nice. Part of the problem solved I guess.
Now on to the overclocking...I can boot into windows at up to 260 FSB (the highest I've tried) with HTT at 3x and my memory at 333. The trouble is, no matter what FSB I've got it at, I can't seem to get it stable enough to run Prime95. Now, I don't know if this is a big deal or not. Games run fine, the machine runs 24x7 without falling over, it just won't run Prime95. To clarify, it won't run Prime at *any* bus speed over 200, even if the CPU multiplier is lowered. I've tried adding a bit of voltage (up to 1.6v) and it still doesn't make any difference.
I've seen posts of people saying they can run 285+ on this board, and I'm a bit dissappointed so far...but I don't know if the board or the CPU is the culprit. If I could just put the Prime95 issue out of my mind, I'd likely be happy
Here's what I've got:
Asus K8N (1007.4 BIOS...have tried 1006 as well)
Retail Sempron 3000+
512 Corsair XMS 3200
Sparkle 300W PS (also tried a Sparkle 350, no difference)
Radeon 9800
Seagate 120GB
TB Santa Cruz
Hauppage 401
Mitsumi/NEC 1300A DVDRW
Any ideas or suggestions? I can probably still return or exchance the mobo...but at this point I don't know if I've got a defective board, CPU that just isn't up to it, or simply a ****-poor BIOS.
