ECS K7S5A PRO BIOS recommendations?

[Hork]

I've upgrade my ECS K7S5A PRO mobo BIOS to the latest official release, but I see a bunch of stuff out there about Honey and Cheapo BIOS upgrades.

I'm not overclocking and I have an Athlon XP 2000 in there (from the Fry's deal) plus a 512MB Centon 2700 DDR stick. Recommendations? Should I stick with stock or go for one of these other BIOSes?

Also, the stock BIOS speed ratings have something I'm confused about.... You can set the CPU/Memory speeds in a single setting to 100/100, 100/133, 133/133, 166/166, etc... Right now I have it at 100/133 since I have DDR in there. My question is about the CPU speed... should I be running at 100 or 133?

I appreciate your help! Thanks!

Bill

 

[Peter]

With an Athlon XP, your CPU bus speed should of course be 133 MHz. Technically, the perfect combination for your CPU and RAM would be 133/166, but 133/133 is what the K7S5Apro will do for you.

 

[Hork]

Oh wow! That's great to hear!

For the memory... I have the 512MB Centon 2700 DDR, but the K7S5A supposedly only supports 2100 DDR at 266 (which implies a 133 clock speed for the memory). So, would 133/166 be overclocking the memory, or is there something I'm missing that would let me run the memory at 166?

 

[Peter]

PC2700 memory is OK to run at 166 MHz or less. CPU/RAM 133/166 would be exactly what your CPU and RAM are capable of, but 133/133 is the best the K7S5Apro can make of it. You can try somewhat aggressive RAM timings with your 166 MHz RAM run at 133. Get the software from www.memtest.org to test whether what you're doing is stable.

 

[dderolph]

You can set the CPU/Memory speeds in a single setting to 100/100, 100/133, 133/133, 166/166, etc...

Are you saying you installed a BIOS update in the K7S5A PRO that added the 166MHz speed to the options for setting CPU or RAM speed? I don't see that mentioned at the download sites.

 

[Hork]

Originally posted by: dderolph

You can set the CPU/Memory speeds in a single setting to 100/100, 100/133, 133/133, 166/166, etc...

Are you saying you installed a BIOS update in the K7S5A PRO that added the 166MHz speed to the options for setting CPU or RAM speed? I don't see that mentioned at the download sites.

Do a search for Honey X BIOS and you'll find a BIOS called oc0811. I just flashed up to it, and it works fine.

 

[Hork]

Um, just to clarify... I flashed the bios, but I'm still running at 133/133... haven't played with the OC settings yet. Posts I've read seem to indicate there is some utility to help figure out what speed you can run at with some amount of stability, but I'm not sure what it is.

 

[tcsenter]

SpeedFan

 

[darkjedi1066]

I have a K7S5A Pro board as well. Using the Winflash utility I flashed to the HoneyX 030811, the best overclock I could achieve without lockup is 143/143. Speedfan is a very useful tool as long as you remember that it isn't a permanent OC solution.

If you haven't found it already, here is the best K7S5A forum anywhere:

K7S5A Motherboard Forum

These can be very fickle motherboards, in case you haven't found that out yet. A BIOS flash on a friend's 5.0 Pro yielded a dead system, yet mine flashed without a hitch. The above forum has a wealth of information on getting the most out of your board.

___________________________________________________

K7S5A Pro HoneyX 030811 BIOS (143/143)
Athlon T'bred B 2400XP
Dane Elec 512mb PC2100 cl2
Sapphire Radeon 9500 128mb (Omega driven to 9700pro)
Creative Live Digital 5.1
Seagate 40gb
Liteon DVD
TDK 52X CDRW
Thermaltake Truepower 430w
Raidmax silver window case

 

[imported_quimrider]

I have the K7S5A Pro board, I modded a manual cpuvoltage control and am running a 45W mobile barton XP 2500+ at 2.1ghz (1.52vcore). I use a really good program called CPUCooL to set the FSB. It has a feature called "fine tuning" where you can adjust the FSB in roughly 0.1mhz Only thing is I couldn't get it to change the PCI diviser. With Honey X's bios I couldn't get it to boot at 150mhz fsb. I flashed an older cheapo bios and it boots fine at 150mhz. I then have a program called "CPUMSR" change the multiplier to something lower automatically upon boot(you can mod the desktop chips to make them a mobile chip so that this will work). Then I open up CPUCooL and crank up the FSB. I have a gig of obsolete Kingmax sdram that amazingly is stable up to about 170mhz FSB The highest i've gone is 172mhz but it crashes sporadically. I also have replaced the pathetic excuse of a northbridge heatsink with something a bit more useful. Also if anyone out there has done the manual multiplier mod, it doesnt work with a mobile processor on this board. The mobo is smart enough to recognize the mobile multiplier settings and only uses the manual ones for POST. This caused me hours of agrivation before I figured out what was happening. I could have added a mod for the mobile multiplier pins but I figured why? I can just do that with software in windows.

 

[supacon]

I'd really like to know how you can configure CPU MSR to change the multiplier on boot. My motherboard (an Aopen MK77M series board) only starts my 2500M at 6x, so I need to manually pump it up to 12x, where it makes sense to be.

I don't see any options to start and set this automatically. Can you run it with command line parameters or something?