I just upgraded to an Athlon XP 2200 (strangly, I bought a 2100, but
the dealer sent me a 2200 instead) and a Shuttle AK38 motherboard.
The whole thing worked fine for about three days. The only strange
part was that the Shuttle board has no way to set the clock multiplyer
- it seems to be hard-wired to 13.5x, so I had to set the system bus
frequency low to keep the CPU close to its required frequency.
Yesterday, I had to move the system to a different room. When I got
everything moved and hooked back up, I got nothing upon power-up:
Blank screen, hard drives would spin up and then just sit. I tried
turning it on and off several times and occasionally it would actually
get part-way into the POST and the halt. The network card shows
activity and some other LEDs on the motherboard light up, so I do not
believe the motherboard is bad. I removed the CPU (which had a nice
big heat sink and fan installed the right way according to AMDs
instructions with thermal paste applied) to find a small corner of the
chip (and the corresponding spot on the heat sink) darkend as if it
were burnt. I should mention that I had checked the CPU temperature
several times just to make sure it was properly cooled and even after
hours of use, it was never over 49 degrees C.

I was all ready to admit that I had just fried a chip, but now today,
I put the chip into another system and it seems to work fine. Could
this just be a small part of the chip that will now work somethimes
and not others? Any suggestions on how to proceed?

Sounds as if your motherboard is the culprit here. I'm not sure about
Shuttle, but some motherboards require that you manually set a jumper to the
proper front-side-buss (133 for this processor). Once this is done, the MB
should automaticly set the proper multiplier. The fact that your MB is not
properly recognizing the CPU's speed is a real concern. The fact that your
processor worked properly in another board supports this.


D.


"Jeff Ward" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...
> I just upgraded to an Athlon XP 2200 (strangly, I bought a 2100, but
> the dealer sent me a 2200 instead) and a Shuttle AK38 motherboard.
> The whole thing worked fine for about three days. The only strange
> part was that the Shuttle board has no way to set the clock multiplyer
> - it seems to be hard-wired to 13.5x, so I had to set the system bus
> frequency low to keep the CPU close to its required frequency.
> Yesterday, I had to move the system to a different room. When I got
> everything moved and hooked back up, I got nothing upon power-up:
> Blank screen, hard drives would spin up and then just sit. I tried
> turning it on and off several times and occasionally it would actually
> get part-way into the POST and the halt. The network card shows
> activity and some other LEDs on the motherboard light up, so I do not
> believe the motherboard is bad. I removed the CPU (which had a nice
> big heat sink and fan installed the right way according to AMDs
> instructions with thermal paste applied) to find a small corner of the
> chip (and the corresponding spot on the heat sink) darkend as if it
> were burnt. I should mention that I had checked the CPU temperature
> several times just to make sure it was properly cooled and even after
> hours of use, it was never over 49 degrees C.
>
> I was all ready to admit that I had just fried a chip, but now today,
> I put the chip into another system and it seems to work fine. Could
> this just be a small part of the chip that will now work somethimes
> and not others? Any suggestions on how to proceed?