Need Really Basic Help Building a Classic Athlon System

[Swazzle]

I order an Athlon 750 Slot A CPU and Pox EP-7KXA motherboard from Tiger Electronics last week and now I?m attempting to put everything together but I?m running into a few snags because the documentation is so poor. Hopefully someone can help me.

1. What should the CPU?s Vcore voltage be set at?

2. What should the CPU?s Host Clock Selection be set at? It lists two different settings for 100MHz and 133MHz. I assume I want to set it to 133MHz because I?m using PC133 RAM but on the chart showing the jumper settings there is an asterisk next to the listing for 133 MHz that says ?Reserved?. What does that mean and is it an issue?

3. Here?s a weird question that shows just how ignorant I am. I?m figuring out how to install the heat sink to the CPU. On the bottom (or side depending on how you look it) of the heat sink is a white square of plastic-like paper held on place with weak adhesive. When I pull back the corner of the paper I can see yellow waxed piece of paper under that. And under yellow paper is a dollop of white paste-like stuff. Am I suppose to peel off the two layers of paper and then connect the heat sink and CPU or do I leave the pieces of paper on? Is the white stuff thermal paste and what exactly does it do?

4. Yesterday I bought a stick of Mushkin PC133 Infineon RAM for the system. Today I found out that my system will only support unbuffered memory. Does anyone know if the RAM I bought is unbuffered or how to find out ahead of time?

 

[CTho9305]

1. Depends. Is it gonna be a real classic or a slot tbird? (check the cache size). My tbird 700 defaults to 1.7, but it runs great on 1.6
2. set it to 100, and then if you can set a your ram ratio to 4:3 (should be a bios option or jumper). If you buy a GFD (golf finger device), then you can overclock or underclock. If you want to try the 133 (won't work... the boards don't usually reach even 115 fsb) then lower your multiplier first.
3. It may be a thermal pad, which you should leave, or something you should remove. I'd need more detailed info.
4. Almost all ram I know of is unbuffered.

 

[Spoooon]

1. You don't have to worry about the vcore. It'll be set at default and work just fine. If you plan on overclocking, you may have to up it. Or to keep things cooler, you can lower it some and see if you're still stable.
2. I'm sure the host clock selection is for your bus speed. Perhaps the asterisk is indicating that by selecting 133 you're only changing the memory speed? Try 133 and see if it posts. If it doesn't, change it back to 100.
3. Again, if you plan on overclocking, remove the crap and use thermal paste. Preferably something like arctic silver. If you do stick with what's on there, peel off both pieces of paper. The thermal paste is there to help transfer heat from the heatplate to the heatsink.
4. It's probably unbuffered.