The Athlon 64 3200+ is UNLOCKED... sorta

[blammo22]

I just picked up my new Athlon 64 setup:

Athlon 64 3200+ (socket 754)
Albatron K8X800 Pro II (Via K8T800) (Link)


The Albatron board is pretty nice - Envy24PT audio onboard, gigabit LAN, Serial ATA/RAID, etc... It also has many options for overclocking in the BIOS. Adjustable voltages (CPU, DDR, AGP, northbridge, southbridge, and LDT). It has options for setting the FSB (200 - 300 MHz), memory, and upstream/downstream LDT bus widths (8 or 16 bit).

The GOOD: It also has a multiplier setting... I tried it, and I was able to successfully run my 3200+ (10 x 200MHz) at 1.8GHz (9 x 200MHz). I verfied in both the BIOS and Windows that it was working underclocked...

The BAD: Multipliers above 10 are not available for the CPU. In other words, you can set it to lower multipliers, but not higher. Maybe this is AMD's way of catering to overclockers (?) while at the same time combatting remarked chips. The Albatron board does not have an AGP/PCI lock, so even if I had fast memory there's not much I could do with it... maybe in the future some boards will take advantage of the multiplier setting, though (i.e., _include_ an AGP/PCI lock VIA...).

Anyway, an FYI for those interested, since I haven't seen much/any info on the Albatron board.

P.S. Has anyone with a K8T800 board managed to run 3 double-sided DIMMs at DDR400? The manual for my board says that this is only okay when running DDR200 (i.e., 100MHz memory) - DDR400 only supports up to 2 DIMMs. I tried it with my 3 sticks of TwinMOS DDR400, and I had frequent reboots @ DDR400. Setting the memory to the recommended DDR200 worked fine, but kinda a waste of money for this system. Right now, everything seems to be running okay with 2 sticks @ DDR400... any other user experiences are welcome.

 

[blammo22]

>> sig updated <<

 

[NFS4]

It's been a while since I've seen 6 PCI slots on a mobo

Also, does it have PCI/AGP Lock?

 

[pelikan]

Thanks for posting this. It's the first I've heard of unlocked multis on the A64.

 

[Lyfer]

Great post! Thanx for the heads up.



No access to muliplyer higher than 10x would be ok if there WAS PCI/AGP lock, but without its totally useless unless you're a sucker for underclocking. Time to wait for Abit solution with Softmenu III.


BTW in the Athlon FX@2.8GHZ overclock posted, how were they able to obtain a hacked BIOS? Will end users such as us be able to access such a BIOS?

 

[pelikan]

I read that the newest Asus beta bios unlocks the AFX

 

[blammo22]

Originally posted by: NFS4
It's been a while since I've seen 6 PCI slots on a mobo

Also, does it have PCI/AGP Lock?

As I mentioned in my first post, it doesn't include the lock... too bad. Maybe a future BIOS update? Or we may just be SOL...

I guess no one else is trying an A64 with 3 double-sided DIMMs... I'm still wondering if the limitation is the chipset (most likely), or my memory... hrm.

Another question for anyone who might be able to answer: any good Linux distros recommended? I'm thinking of installing Redhat 9 (I know it's still 32-bit, but it's what I'm most familar with)... any easy-to-setup 64-bit distros out there? Comments/suggestions are welcome.

 

[will889]

From what im hearing, it's the same old no lock siuation with the VIA boards - again. Like was pointed out above, if you can't get higher multis, your SOL when that AGP/PCI bus get's out of spec. I Guess as more people run the boards, and bios revisions come out, we will soon see about the lock - hopefully it's not a hardware limitation again.

 

[Assimilator1]

Seeing as the divider is quite high to allow 33MHZ PCI at 200MHz FSB ,you should be ale to go to 225MHz FSB without too many problems ,unless you have some flaky PCI parts

Re the memory limits ,sounds like its the same kinda situation they had with the KT400 etc ,limitations of the chipset ,its difficult to keep 'the signals' clean at such a high bus speed with multiple RAM modules.

Btw ,you fancy running a particular benchmark to see how it stacks up against P4s & Ath XPs?

 

[pelikan]

Yeah, speaking of benchmarks, if you have UT2003 could you run the bench at 1024x768? I bet you'd get over 100FPS.

 

[blammo22]

Okay, I emailed the "Dr. Pro" at Albatron for some further clarification... Here's the first response I got:

---
My Question: I noticed the multiplier setting in the BIOS only allows for settings 10 or lower (in the case of the Athlon 64 3200+). Is there a chance of higher multipliers becoming available in a future BIOS update, or is this a limitation of the CPU or chipset?

Their Answer: "Virtually the multiplier will fixed by AMD, and the mainboard will auto detect it.You don't have to worry about it."

My Question: The manual notes that when installing 3 double-sided DIMMs it is necessary to lower the memory speed to DDR200. I tried 3x 512MB TwinMOS DDR400 sticks @ DDR400 speed, and I noticed that I got frequent reboots out of Windows XP. The 3 sticks seemed to work okay at DDR200 (as specified by the manual), but it's kind of a waste of money to run the Athlon 64 system with such low speed memory settings. If it is possible to improve the stability of running 3 double-sided DIMMs at DDR400 speeds, I would really appreciate it - my request for a future BIOS update, if possible.

Their Answer: "It's VIA chipset limitation.Besides we had mentioned it in our user's
manual.It may be improved in the future.But it depends on the VIA.
Please kindly understand it."
----

Anyway, I emailed again for further clarification regarding my first question. I also asked them about the AGP/PCI lock - hopefully I will get an answer about this...

 

[Assimilator1]

I doubt very much they could provide a PCI lock without a chipset revision

 

[blammo22]

Originally posted by: pelikan
Yeah, speaking of benchmarks, if you have UT2003 could you run the bench at 1024x768? I bet you'd get over 100FPS.

The Athlon 64 setup is currently my workstation for research - writing computational codes, etc. So, it only has a Radeon 9200SE - nothing to get excited about. I doubt I'd get any good gaming scores with it... Anandtech and all the other A64 reviews should have these tests covered anyways.

Personally, I'm kind of hoping to get a decent 64-bit Linux distro installed and do some benchmarking on my CFD code...

 

[Lyfer]

Man the AMD-64 bit platform needs a board with PCI/AGP lock AND multiplyer adjustments (I can live with just PCI/AGP LOCK).


This sux for overclocking any Athlon 64's.


The 51-FX waaaay outta reach.

 

[Assimilator1]

blammo22
SETI makes a good benchmark & you don't need a good vid card for it either ,us folks over at the DC section would be interested to see how fast your rig is (you'd be the 1st I think,atm)

 

[JBT]

I hjeard that there was a beta bios comming out for these board to get upto the 14x multi.

 

[NicColt]

Originally posted by: JBTele
I hjeard that there was a beta bios comming out for these board to get upto the 14x multi.

It doesn't really matter, if it's hardware or cpu limited it won't go higher than 10 even if the board supports higher clocks. It will just default down to 10