Help! Athlon defaulting to 1300MHz.

Ok so what started as a simple CPU fan upgrade turned out to be a lot of headache. When putting the fan on the screwdriver slipped as usually happens once or twice, but this time the motherboard no longer would post. It powered on, just wouldn't boot.

So we go out and buy a Gigabyte 7nf-rz cuz it seemed decent and wasn't too costly. As is common we had to repair the Windows install (basically a reinstall with no format) because the IDE drivers won't let the OS load (it just blue screens on loading). Only this time a repair didn't work, so we ended up having to reformat and doing a fresh install.

Anyway, as usual the AthlonXP processor defaulted to 1300MHz, something I've had happen on my motherboards many times when doing hardware stuff (his is actually an XP 3000). But in my other BIOSes I could manually adjust multipliers and frequencies to raise it to proper speeds. Well this motherboard doesn't let you adjust those things, so I can only set the FSB. There is also a switch on the board called "CLK" something or other, and the manual says to set it to default ("On") to use buses of 266, 333, or 400. When turning the switch on, however, the computer refuses to post.

Also the RealTek onboard LAN lights up with a cable plugged in, but in Windows there are no network devices even detected. I saw nothing in his BIOS about enabling or disabling the onboard LAN myself either.

I am really thinking I should return it and spend a little more for a trusty Asus that I know how to work. I will likely do that tomorrow to solve this as quickly as possible, but I'd love to see if anyone has other suggestions for me first.

One thing that just came to mind for me: I bet his AthlonXP 3000 is a 333MHz version rather than a 400MHz one.

In another forum someone mentioned that to fix this on their lower speed processors (such as a 2200) they turned the FSB to 166MHz and flipped the CLK switch on the motherboard, allowing it to successfully boot. Well, I wondered to myself "well then how will this work for a higher speed processor such as this XP 3000?" If he has the 333MHz version, however, then the hard-set multiplier of 13x would be fine if we're able to set the FSB to 166MHz (166x13=2158, the basic speed of a 333MHz XP 3000+). I will definitely give this a try tomorrow.

As for the onboard LAN, I will see if he can install any drivers from the motherboard disc. I found it odd that the device didn't even show up in the Device Manager, however. I would think even if the drivers hadn't been properly installed it will show up as an unknown device at least.

Set Optimized Defaults

I just got a new mobo for myself also. I have an Athlon XP 2600+, and it defaulted to 1500 i think. My bios let me "Load Optimized Results For This Page." There might be a hotkey for that at the bottom of the page. Hope it all gets better, LRC

I remember trying that option. There was "Load Optimized Settings" and also some other option, but it didn't seem like either one worked. I'll definitely take a closer look, however.

Well it seems to be up and running now. I do believe it was the CLK switch and FSB causing things to be wrong. With the CLK switch set to "Off" it defaults the FSB be to 100MHz no matter what. In the BIOS I had set it to 200MHz, however, without even thinking that his processor might be a 333MHz model. Thus flipping the switch on to support higher bus speeds wouldn't allow the computer to boot because I had the frequency set too high. Now we turned it to 166MHz and flipped the switch on and it works, and now randomly the onboard LAN card is detected as well.