8k9a7i + Athlon 2500+ ... overclock possible or not???

[EltonH]

Hi guys

I'm not a master at this overclocking biz so can sombody give me a steer here please?

I'm running an EP 8K9A7i board with an Athlon Barton 2500+ and 1.5gb of PC3200 ram. Can I ramp up the clockspeed at all on this rig??? I've tried to get to the equiv. of a 3000+ (2167mhz) by pushing the multiplier up to 13 with FSB at 166 but it just reports the good old 1833mhz .. what steps (if any) am I missing here????? What's the best I can get out of this? ... before i fling in the towel and but somehting else.

Ta
Elton

[chrisbard]

As a good friend of mine once said:

agp bus set to 66
look if your ram can run with 200fsb also your board
then set your fsb to 200*11
then raise multiplier when it is stable check with super pi at least 1 mbit
raise core volt dont go over 1.85
if your board and or ram cant run with 200fsb let it all run with 166 and then raise multiplier

[EltonH]

thanks chris ... but



still no luck

The board has a max fsb of 333 which i guess is the 166 doubled up. So - I set it all to 166 (can't find the AGP bus ... maybe a hex value ... DA) any way .. all at 166 with an x of 11 i get what you'd expect from an athlon 2500+ .... 1833 mhz. Push it up to 13 .. and I still get the chip recognised as a 2500+ and still at the same 1833. Third party apps tell me also that the multiplier is still 11 even though the mobo setting says 11. Grrrrr

Why did my Gigabyte board have to blow!!!!! I was enjoying 3200+ speeds for years!

[Repo Man]

Do you have the most up to date BIOS available?

You are dealing with a KT400 chipset now, which is a whole other ball game. Take a look at this review of an MSI KT400 board, MSI KT4 Ultra-FISR KT400 Motherboard Review - PCSTATS.com .

I had an Epox 8k3A+. Once I upgraded the northbridge cooling, I was able to take it up to 209 FSB. This resulted in a very out of spec PCI/AGP bus. I had an Nvidia card, so it wasn't bothered, and none of the rest of my components seemed to have a problem. But I also recall reading that the KT400 wasn't as tolerant of FSB overclocking as the older KT333.

I actually got the idea about doing something about the northbridge from a post on this forum.

Also, the KT400 only has a 1/5 divider, same as the KT333. So the more you increase the FSB, the further out of specifications the AGP and PCI busses will be. Way back when, Nvidia video cards were known to be more tolerant of overclocked AGP bus speeds than ATI ones were. If you have an ATI card, you probably won't be going much above 333 even if you improve the northbridge cooling.