Nvidia Nforce AutoUnlock Multiplier Motherboards

[Cashmoney995]

I know a ton of people are confused by this so lets start a thread on this.

The Nvidia Nforce 2 chipset being present on a motherboard does not neccessarily mean that the multiplier on the motherboard will be automatically unlocked. There are however several Nforce 2 motherboards who's multiplier is automatically unlocked without altering the L1 bridges on the processor packaging.

If your motherboard does have autounlock and it is an Nforce 2 motherboard then please post its make and model number, revision number and whether or not it came like that or you had to do a bios flash inorder to be able to change the multiplier settings.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Boards I've used

Soltek SL-75MRN-L
Soltek SL-75FRN-L
Shuttle SN45G Ultra400 cube

all support multiplier manipulation out of the box.

Shuttle mATX MN31N- provides FSB access only.

 

[KF]

Just to make it clear: Athlons have not had locked multipliers for quite a long time now. A lot of review sites gave the impression that nForce2 motherboards had some sort of auto-unlock. They don't. nForce2 motheboards do exactly what VIA motherboards did to over-ride the multiplier that AMD sets at the factory.

Many nForce2 motherboards do not have the circuitry or the necessary BIOS programming to over-ride all 5 bits of the multiplier code, but only the 4 that Athlons originally had. Therefore you are limited to multipliers from one of two sets, the one with the 5th bit high or the one with the 5th bit low, depending on what the factory set multiplier had. The division point is 12.5x to 13x (2100+). The wire trick that people talk about doesn't unlock Athlons, it sets the 5th multiplier bit, which some motherboard lack the ability to do. People who happen to have a CPU with the 5 th bit set to access the set of multipliers they desire (usually the lower set) often think the motherboard has auto-unlocked the multipliers, when in fact their motherboard can't access all the multipliers.

I had an MSI K7N2-ILSR DELTA a couple of weeks ago and it could not over-ride the 5th mulitplier bit. In addition, it was missing many of the possible settings in the BIOS.

 

[pspada]

What ^ he said. So, buy a cheapie mobo, maybe no multipliers. But buy a decent mobo, and you good to go.