AMD XP 1800 running at 1250Mhz?

[bornl33t]

What would cause a month old motherboard and processor to loose all their Cmos setting and start running as a ATHLON 1250mhz instead of a xp 1800 ??

The system has never been overclocked, not tamperd with, been sitting in an enclosed case, sufficient cooling.

Last week when I turned it on it tried to boot from network for whatever reason.

Is the mobo faulty or whats the deal?

[pbzmag]

Athlon CPU's actually runs around 1200, 1.2GHz. 1800+ is the speed equivalent to the Intel chips. Because AMD has a higher throughput, they can run the chip at a slower speed. The Intel chips runs alittle faster but you will not notice a difference. That difference is in the "statistical margin of insignifigance". As for your problem, that speed is the factory settings for the XP chips. You can bump it up to 1.5GHz with a stock fan by changing one of the CMOS settings, don't remember which one though. I recently changed mines to 1.5GHz without any problems. Any higher I will need better cooling. It also sound like your mobo reverted back to original settings. What kind of mobo is it?

pbzmag

[Brak]

i have a 1.7 ghz...

[FeelTheRT]

ah jeez. A 1800+ shouldn't be at 1.2Ghz. i believe it hsould be around 1.5Ghz. What type of RAM do you have? The CPU frequency should be 133Mhz. Check your FSB.

edit: if the cpu freq is at 100, then it will be around 1.2Ghz. Make sure it is at 133 or higher. Your processor is basicly underclocked.

[Koosh]

yeah, what you need to do is get into the BIOS... I'm assuming you know how to do that...

change the bus speed from 100mhz to 133. That should bump it up the the XP speeds...

[bornl33t]

I dunno what's going on with this thing, maybe my cmos battery is shot..I guess it's happened before on a new mobo, but I hate when hat thing dies after 30 days

Last night when I turned it on it tried to boot from LAN... cause It's not set up for that. so it just stoped

Then today the cmos was cleared.. so yeah, that's why the proccessor was running at 1200

I now have it running at 1800mhz again... it was a bios setting..so it got reset when the cmos emtied. ANyway, it's fixed again... anyone else hear about this sorta stuff with Elitegroup mobo's?

[DiRTyBuNNy]

I've never dealt with the ECS stuff personally so it's possible..you may want to post up on Tom's Hardware's Forums or Anandtech. Myself, I usually stick with ASUS or ABiT..

[petefol]

Originally posted by Heat
I now have it running at 1800mhz again... it was a bios setting..so it got reset when the cmos emtied.

you xp1800+ shouldn't run at 1.8ghz, it should run a little at 1.53ghz unless you overclocked. i think my 1700+ runs around 1.47ghz with the fsb at 133.

[bornl33t]

it's actually a xp 2000

so something around 1800 should be normal

[Nobody077]

If the problem keeps up I would replace the battery and do a flash update on your bios. Even though your MB is that new there are almost alwase a bio's update by the time they hit the shelfs. My XP1600 runs at 1.59ghz on my MSI moterboard(its also unlocked/overclocked and watercooled runing at 35deg cel under full load) (www.dangerden.com for the best watercooling blocks)

[FeelTheRT]

i have an ECS mobo as well and i love it. Do you have a K7S5A motherboard? I dont know where all this crap about this board came about. The SiS 735 is a good northbridge chipset really. It beats many of its competitors such as some of the Alis and VIAs which is what some ASUS boards use. To access BIOS, when it first starts up when it is checking your IDE devices, press "del".

[joeyjoe367]

Originally posted by Heat
I dunno what's going on with this thing, maybe my cmos battery is shot..I guess it's happened before on a new mobo, but I hate when hat thing dies after 30 days

Last night when I turned it on it tried to boot from LAN... cause It's not set up for that. so it just stoped

Then today the cmos was cleared.. so yeah, that's why the proccessor was running at 1200

I now have it running at 1800mhz again... it was a bios setting..so it got reset when the cmos emtied. ANyway, it's fixed again... anyone else hear about this sorta stuff with Elitegroup mobo's?

YES! I own an EliteGroup Motherboard, and it seems to do this once in a while also.

No big deal really, just gotta reset CMOS once in a while.

[digitard]

As a computer tech for the past 3yrs for HP and Insight and a computer builder let me explain ...

1) CMOS: The CMOS is just a battery ... its just the silver battery on the board, but it does provide the power to save the changes in the BIOS .. The BIOS is the actual data chip... When you cleared the BIOS it reset to its BURNT in default state, the FSB (bus speed) in default is 100mhz ... now the multiplier (bus x muliplier = actual cpu speed) is locked into the chip, so when the bus went to 100mhz it showed the lower speed (1200 for you) .. when you went in and changed it to 133mhz it was able to get to its right speed.

Athlon XP series chips dont run at the model number ... they are named after their performance rating ... so an 1800+ chip performs equivilant or better than a competetive 1800mhz CPU even though it actually runs at 1533mhz because its design makes it perform internally better ...

If that ever happens again just make sure your FSB (bus speed) in the BIOS is set to 133mhz instead of 100mhz and you should be fine.

If this is happening often go to the motherboard manufacturers website and see if they have a BIOS update available ... that might fix your problem ... its a software download, but it makes permanant changes to the BIOS ROM chip, so if something goes wrong your system will not boot, but if your fairly computer savvy and your systems stable you should be okay ... just make sure the floppy disk you use is good.

In the future try upgrading to an ASUS (which I have) or ABIT motherboard ... they use LIVE UPDATES so you can use the net to update your BIOS plus ASUS is the industry leader in motherboards.

If you have ANY other questions just ask me ... I'd be more than willing to answer.

Sincerely,
Dave

[bornl33t]

thanks dave, I was actually looking at asus, which I perfer, but I'm ont rich, trying to buy a house and x-mas presents so I didn't go quite so overboard on this thing. I think the actual price differance was 100$ or close to it, plus I don't have to buy ram for a while, which was a good thing cause the stuff just drop 50$ in the last week, so I scored on this deal pretty sweet. I ended up paying exactly 200$ for the chip, board and a sweeeeeet chrome cooling fan with copper fins!!

deal huh?


Anyway, so far it's not done it again, but everying ppl have said here so far it true. The bios did loose their setting and were reset. It's running sweet again...

I do NOT like to mess with flashing the E-proms... I've ONLY had trouble with those boogers so I'm gonna havea a friends screw it up for me this time before I send it in to get fixed... that is IF I ever have trouble again.