Old PC parts

Talic

I recently got some old pc parts from my father (actually, Athlon XP era parts) and I ran into something kinda interesting regarding two motherboards with cpus. It's been so long since I've used them (partly my father probably only had one, I the other) I forgot/didn't know the clock speeds. Anyways, I found it interesting that one had a nForce 2 with a 1250mhz cpu (not sure what + rating that should be) and the other had a VIA Apollo KT266A chipset with a much faster 2700+ (2167mhz) cpu. Both mobos are Epox boards.

First thing that came to my mind is to swap the cpus and put the faster one in the nForce board since it seems like its the nicest of the two boards. But something caught my eye while I was booting up the nForce board, the cpu in the nForce board wasn't be read out the same way as the VIA board. The nForce board was displaying the cpu by clock speed (1250mhz) rather then the + rating. Then I went into the cmos and saw the fsb was set at 100mhz. From the specs of the nForce chipset, I believe the fsb should be set up to 333mhz. I also found it weird that the 1250mhz cpu doesn't show up any place while searching google.

The cmos is pretty much stock right now since theres no batteries for the motherboard (I'm planning on picking up one) could this be something weird happening with the dip switches? It doesn't help that I can't download the manual off the Epox site (thank you slow ftp server) so I can't look it up.

I'll probably just swap the cpus but I was just wondering if anyone would remember some of this stuff. I kinda don't want to rip up that pc again and find out theres something with a dip switch after I swapped chips.


One more thing kinda off topic, if theres something wrong with your pc and you ruled out the video and memory, its probably the psu. Thinking back to my early days I can probably think of 2 or 3 times that a psu gave out on me and I didn't catch it. Not to mention that I think a bad psu blew up out a spare pc one time. So if new drivers and memtest doesn't help then replace the psu :P

hetty

Some boards had an auto DIP switch position, all switches were off or something like that, then you could set the FSB in the BIOS like normal. If not you could just trying different variations until you get a frequency that matches the processor speed, obviously it would be better if you had the user manual. It looks like your FSB is either 266 or 333. But you can always Google the processor model number for the exact FSB & multiplier settings.

HeroPsycho

Just as an FYI, it doesn't matter which CPU you put on each respective board, the Nforce2 motherboard system will outperform the system with the KT266A due to the NForce2's massively superior memory controller. You definitely want the best CPU on the NForce2 board, as the KT266A system will bottleneck any processor you put on it.

Talic

I really haven't had time to mess with the cpus but I did try to download the manual and it seems not to want to work for like two days. It seems like Epox doesn't like to maintain it's FTP server. Can anyone else try? http://www.epox.com/USA/downloads.asp

I don't like the idea of not being able to download chipset drivers either.

I'm going to work on swapping the cpus again tomorrow, I need to study for exams tonight though.