On 21 Feb 2005 14:04:48 -0800,
(E-Mail Removed) (Kevin
Lam) wrote:
>Hi all, I hope someone could help me with this...
>
>I have a motherboard which officially supports upto althon 3000+ but
>has a overclock function which could push the FBS to 200Mhz.
Generally it's better not to try handling specific
situations with generalities. IE- list your hardware,
namely the motherboard and it's chipset.
>
>Because of that overclock function, I bought a 3200+ to give it a
>try... (which runs at 200mhz), I have also bought 1G of 400mhz DDR RAM
>just to hope that it runs
>
>But when I try it, I found that the furthest that I can set is 194mhz
>fsb...
Most often that means you need change a jumper, in general.
Check the manual.
>
>I know you guys probably say that why bothered, buy another
>motherboard, but since I am short of money now, I need to wait for
>next month before I can get a new one...
>
>For the moment, should I run it at 166mhz(333mhz) which the
>motherboard supports, but the 3200+ shows as 2500+ only...??? or
>should I run both the ram and the cpu at 194 (388mhz)??? Which would
>be faster?
Clearly the 194 would be, but make sure the board uses the
higher PCI divider at 194, so the PCI bus isn't out of spec.
If it's an nForce motherboard you don't have that issue so
long as bios is set to "auto" (or whatever, can vary per
board) as they support locked PCI & AGP bus speed such that
you can pick any FSB that (would otherwise) run stable.
>
>Is there any problem running the RAM and CPU at 388mhz, given that,
>the CPU and RAM both supports upto 400mhz?? Would it damage the
>CPU/RAM?
No, being under-spec for the two it is not an issue.
HOWEVER, you still have to deal with the issue of the
motherboard, that overclocking IT, and/or it's bios issues,
the flexibility in setting that bus speed and supportive PCI
& AGP bus speeds, could be problematic. Specifically an
overclocked PCI bus can tend to make network adapters, IDE
controllers, and USB malfunction.... other problems too but
most often, those 3 problems surface first, at lower
(overclocked) PCI bus speeds than others.
First I'd determine why the board isn't allowing
200MHz/DDR400 FSB. I"m inclined to think that if the board
really doesn't allow 200MHz/DDR400 under ANY circumstances,
that it doesn't have the PCI divisor ability to run
194MHz/DDR388, either... but I don't often try to run 194,
could be mistaken.