Hey all, I'm going absolutely nuts. I'm building a new system up for my mom and the parts she bought are fubar! The old board wouldn't format the HDD when I tried to install windows XP pro on it, though the hard drive did fine loading in my PC. Bought a new board and it won't POST. I had the Bus set to 233MHz which is what AMD lists as the frequency for the AthalonXP 2800+, but when I put the processor back in the old board to make sure I didn't fry the processor it read it's bus speed as 100MHz. I upped the speed to 233 on that board and it stopped posting. Do I have a bunk chip? If so, is the old board actually ok?

I'll post all the specs of the boards when I get back, but any 1st thoughts would be appreciated.

Hello and welcome to Techspot.

The correct front side bus speed for your athlon 2800+ cpu is 166mhz. By setting it to 233mhz this constitutes a massive overclock, and that is why your system wont post.

If you look at the cpu specs below you will see that the Athlon xp 2800+ has an fsb of 333mhz which is means it should be set to 166mhz. 166mhz X the multiplier of 12.5 = 2083mhz clock speed.

See HERE for athlon specs.

Regards Howard :wave: :wave: