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Grrr...processor upgrade frustration

B

Barryj61

Member
The story so far........

I'm trying to squeeze another year of life out of my ancient box with the venerable ECS K7S5A motherboard.
I found a dirt cheap Athlon XP 2200 to replace the 1.2 T-Bird that's been running in it the past 3 years. Swapped the processor and did what I thought was the necessary BIOS upgrade. Set the processor speed to 133/133, and..........nothing. It recognized it correctly as a 2200, did the memory check and found all the drives, then stopped dead cold. Strike one!

Just out of curiosity, I fired it up again, but loaded the default BIOS settings using the 100/100 speed setting. It recognized the processor as an XP 1500.......but it started right up and ran perfectly. So my next thought is, let's try another BIOS. I've tried 4 different BIOS versions with this board, all with the same result; runs perfectly at 100/100, but stops dead at 133/133 (BTW, it always ran perfectly at 133/133 with the old T-bird). Strike two!

The first 3 BIOS versions I tried were "official" ECS versions; the last was the Honey-X overclockers BIOS (even though I have no designs on overclocking this beast). So I tried bumping up the clock speed a touch at a time. I can get it to 124/124 (equalling an XP 2000), and that's as far as she goes.

So what's everyone's thoughts here? Do I have a bogus processor, a cooling issue, or something else I'm completely missing? This thing's driving me nuts!
 
Just thought of something else to add.....using PC2100 (266) DDR memory. I know some people have had difficulties with this board using PC133, but that's not the case here.
 
As long as it's set to use spd, you should be fine on that. Is there any option in bios to set pci/agp clocks or dividers? Im not too familiar with k7s5a's.
 
I had a problem with my old viakt133a based motherboard. For me the problem was that there was two versions of 2100+. One based on .18 core and one based on 0.13, unfortunately my motherboard only supported the 0.18 core. So I had to buy a nForce2 board and 1Gb ram to get it working 😛

The symptoms was similar to yours.
 
Hmmmmm...... I have 2 256MB sticks of PC2100 in right now, but they're different brands. I might pull one at a time and see what happens. Both sticks worked fine with the old T-bird; are the Athlon XP's more 'sensitive' when it comes to memory quality?
 
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