So what's the big secret? (Subtitled: CALLING ALL A7V880 USERS!)

[theredpriest]

I've had 3 so-called 200-mhz FSB capable boards:

1) Gigabyte 7N400 Pro
2) AOpen AK79D-400 Max
3) Asus A7V880

Only the 7N400 ever ran for any time at 200. In fact it ran at 209 for
5 months before I turned it off during a move. Set it up about a month
later but it never booted at 200 again, best I could get out of it
after that was 175, but at 166 I could run my HyperX PC-3500 stable at
452 with 2-3-3-7 timings and a vdimm of 2.8. I ran the 7N400 with a
T-bred 2400+ at the default 1.65v, but finally burned it out by raising
vcore and trying to get back to 200.

The AOpen board never, ever even posted. All I ever got was the
voice-error message "Your cpu may have a problem." And I tried 3
different cpu's on it, a T-bird 1200, an XP1700+ and my new UNLOCKED
(0328) Barton 2500+. Each time I got the same error message, despite
always clearing the cmos.

Now I know the A7V will POST at over 200 but WinXP won't boot with an
FSB above 170. So I tried re-installing XP, and now it won't boot even
at the default 11x, I had to kick it down to 10x to use it.

So what is the big secret? How the hell do I get a board to run stable
at 200? And please don't tell me "raise the vcore/vdimm" (did it) or
"get a better PSU" (TT-430w) or "update the bios" (1008 now) or "enable
AGP asynchronizaton" (did that too). Been there and done that over and
over again!

PUHLEEEZE HELP! I'm so sick of this I want to go bck to my old SDRAM
board, it least it works as advertised. I sure hope
Winchester/nF3/KT890 will work a helluva lot better than this.

 

[theredpriest]

An Update...

I was able to reach an FSB on the A7V880 of 203mhz by lowering the
multiplier on my unlocked Barton 2500+ to 8.5x, raising vcore slightly
to 1.70. But this is ridiculous, it won't even run at 200 up to the
2500+ rated speed of 1800mhz! Again, any help here is appreciated.