Heya fella's, first time posting here... so go easy

I just bought a AMD Athlon XP 2600+ Barton today! and god was i looking forward to ditching my old duron 1ghz.. anyway i installed it and booted it up.. thats when all hell broke loose

It only wants to work stable at 1153mhz.. i've emailed Asus and they gave me the settings of 166 11.5 8-3-3-3.. i tried them and no luck

i updated the bios to the latest and still no luck.. friends have tried helping me and once again no luck :/

i just invested my last penny in the ram and cpu so i cant afford to buy another motherboard :/

if anyone could help it would be great thanks

PS. i've searched these forums and others 100 times and i've tried all the suggestions tis why i resorted to my last and final pitch to get this to work

Wha kind of memory do you have ? ( Brand, Model, etc ). Is it PC2700 & is it set to run in Sync with the FSB ?

Is the heatsink properly installed ? Did you apply a thin layer of Artic Silver or was there a thermal pad at the bottom of the heatsink ?

The 2600+ Barton is meant to run at 1917mhz ( 11.5 * 166mhz ) right now it's running at 1155 so I suppose -> 11.5 * 100mhz. Have you tried upping the FSB to 133 first ?

Do that & go in the BIOS to monitor CPU & System temps.

PS. Welcome to TechSpot. Hope you enjoy your stay.:wave:

Thanks for the welcome

Unfortunately yes i have it all lined up and everything in order but still no use
i tried the 133 many many many times same with teh 166

So what happens when you set it to 133 & monitor the temps ? Do they seem normal ?

Do the voltages coming from the PSU seem stable ? BTW what kind of PSU is it ?

400w psu, and i cant even get to look at the cmos when i change it to 133 becoz it just turns itself off right after it reboots

What revision of the board is it ?

Rev 2

Okay, I'm not trying to be a smart@$$ here, but you didn't by chance use thermal paste "with" a thermal pad, did you? I have to ask this as I've seen it in the past.

no

Have you tried with only one memory module ?

yes

You've reset your bios to its' default settings?

yes

Hi, first post here and I have exactly the same problem as Slackky.
Same board: A7N8X-X and a AMD 2600+, and 512Mb of PC2700 DDR ram

I have the multiplier at 11.5, freq at 133 and I get the CPU to run at 1533MHz. Temperature is normal about 40C.

When I go intothe BIOS and change it to 166 and reboot, the startup shows it as a 2600+, but then, just before getting into Win XP it reboots itself, I then have to go into the BIOS again. This time the temperature is about 85C and I have to change it back to 133.

Did anyone ever get a solution???????

yep... i bought a new cpu fan (jet7) and some of that compound

did you buy the new fan becuase you knoew it would work? or did you just try it?

Just wondering if I need to go to the expense of a new one?

i just tried it and it worked

after the support from here and from a friend i thought why not

but yeah its definately a heating issue so u need to get the compound and a good fan

it wont set u back much but in my opinion the 2600 wasnt a good buy found out the hard way

why wasnt the 2600 a good buy if it wasnt the 2600 that caused the problem? it seemed like a heatsink/fan problem?

Problem solved :grinthumb


Turned out I had put the heatsink on incorrectly (not back to front, but the bar/clips holding it down was on worng - all pressure wasn't on the core). When fitted correctly, the machine booted up okay in XP with CPU running the 1916MHz, and temps of 41C

thanks for everyone's quick reply and suggestions

Colin