BIOS sees Athlon 64 3200+ as 3000+ WTF?

[andrewjnyc]

I just switched from a Biostar motherboard to an MSIK82GM2-FID, and I've been having massive BSOD problems that have kept me from installing Windows on an empty hard drive. When going over the BIOS for the 50,000th time, I noticed that it's reading my Athlon 64 3200+ CPU as a 3000+. It's running at 1.8ghz (the speed of a 3000+), not the 2.0ghz it's supposed to be running at. Needless to say, I'm suspicious that this might have something to do with the chronic BSODs. Right now, I'm using the default BIOS settings. The options in this BIOS are a little different from what I'm used to. What would be the best way to get the motherboard and BIOS to see the CPU for what it is?

 

[RichUK]

Can you not boot to a CD or floppy?

 

[andrewjnyc]

I can boot to a CD, but that does me no good in and of itself--the XP installer gives me a BSOD every time I try to run it. I've been booting to Hiren's Boot CD and runnning its diagnostics, which all reconfirm the 3000+ speed. If I can get the BIOS to see the processor's correct speed, I'm hoping that'll put me on the road to getting my computer working long enough to properly install XP on it!

 

[RichUK]

The reason i asked this question is this would allow for a BIOS update if one was needed.

Is one needed? If so flash it then load optimised defaults.

I?m hypothesising that perhaps you may need a BIOS update as the current BIOS maybe only equipped to see 130nm processors, and although you haven?t stated, you could be running a 3200+ that could be a E6 venice. Evidently the BIOS is not recognising the correct processor so it could be at fault. Just throwing ideas around.

Its best to start from the bottom up, and the first thing to check would be the correct BIOS rev, you could also try resetting the CMOS to see if this points it in the right direction.

Also you mention your diagnostic bootable CD, can you test the RAM on that, this could be beneficial with regards to the BSOD's.

EDIT: Also there could be a hardware fault with your IDE cable and or your CD-ROM drive or even the IDE channel for that matter. I assume this is all in order? Maybe try swapping from the master to the slave connector, different IDE cable, if you've got one a different CD-ROM drive. Also try changing the jumper settings from master/slave cable select.

Also try RAM in different slots, single sticks, remove any unnecessary devices (PCI sound card etc)

 

[andrewjnyc]

I've tried pretty much everything you suggest--I flashed the BIOS, removed PCI devices, experimented with different IDE cables, RAM in different slots, etc. Yesterday, the RAM passed tests I ran on it, but today it was choking up. I belive the processor is a Venice. The board is a new model, so I can't see why its BIOS would have a problem recognizing the processor for what it is (and in the motherboard forum, where I started a thread no-one has replied to yet, there seem to be people using pretty much the same processor /mobo combination).

I have a few different versions of the BIOS that I've downloaded (yesterday, I flashed it to a beta that everyone seems to be saying is far more stable than the latest official release), so maybe I'll try some of the other ones to see if they'll do the trick.