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I just recently purchased a 2600+ athlon, and i want to overclock it.
My motherboard is a a7n8x deluxe (not revision 2).
I currently have one stick of 3200 ddr in. The only settings my mobo will allow me to boot up with for the cpu are 11.5 multiplier at 166mhz. I dont know whether its a barton or thourough bred core, all i know is i bought it last week from dabs and it has a 333mhz fsb (or something to that effect!)
I really would like to overclock, but whenever i try increasing the multiplier or the mhz the machine refuses to boot :(

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I really would like to overclock, but whenever i try increasing the multiplier or the mhz the machine refuses to boot :(

Make sure that the heatsink is right and on correctly. Use CPUCool to check the temperature at normal speeds. With that board, you should be able to bump the front-side bus speed up to about 180 MHz or more without problems. That puts the PCI bus at about 37-38 MHz; occasionally (but rarely), a PCI card will choke when overclocked that high. What brand of RAM? What PCI cards, if any?

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I think the ram is crucialram, as for pci cards a network card and um a tv card. Sound card is inbuilt and the graphics card is a gfx 5200 in the agp slot

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You may not be able to get that much from a 2600+.

They only released it in the Thoroughbred core. From what I've read, that particular core isn't very good for overclocking.

I suggest checking out www.tomshardware.com . They seemed to have some info somewhere on their site about it.

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you may want to check jumpers on the board. The BIOS must work with the jumpers on the board. Be careful this is a great way to fry a mother board and chipset. consider good ventilation and cooling.

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'The problem you are having is not your configuration, it's the A7N8X Deluxe. For some reason, the mobo has difficulties saving info in the BIOS. Just hope that Asus comes out with a bios revision to fix this problem."
Also, if you are having problems booting, Try this. Before you turn on your computer, Press and Hold the TAB button, and turn your computer on. When the memory screen comes up, let go.
For some reason, this forces the mobo to boot up no mater what. Well, is works for me. This is also from asus tech. wupport.

"a 2600+/333MHz FSB runs at either 1910MHz (Barton core). Or at 2150MHz. No AMD processor runs above 2200MHz. At 200MHz X 13 = 2600MHz, you are frying that procesor. You want to back it down to 166MHz X 13 = ~2160MHz if you have a thoroughbred core. 166MHz X 11.5 = ~1910MHz if it's a Barton core. Then slowly increase the frequency via the FSB and/or multiplier until unstable. Then back down until it's stable and not running too hot. A good starting point would be 10 X 200MHz = 2000MHz. And don't try for a 200MHz FSB unless you have PC3200 (DDR400). Overclocking RAM can cause all kinds of problems.
I hope you didn't fry that thing trying to run it at 2600MHz."

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They only released it in the Thoroughbred core. From what I've read, that particular core isn't very good for overclocking.

I've got a 1700+ Thoroughbred-B that says exactly the opposite.

And the Asus board listed is an nForce2 chipset based board. One of the good features about that is the PCI bus is locked at 33MHz, totally independant of FSB.

I'm not sure about the multiplier on the 2600+ being locked or not, but dropped to 11 and running the FSB at 200MHz shouldn't post too much of an issue.

And I don't own a the A7N8X Deluxe, but I remember it either having no jumpers concerning the CPU settings, or just a solitary one. Manual will bring truth to that.

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the only amd processors that i heard that are good overclockers are the amd athlon xp 1700+ with the Thoroughbred b core and the amd athlon xp 2500+ with a barton core

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they also came out with a barton core

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Man.. unless you want to fry your CPU... go ahead with the OverClocking..

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you could try checking with your cpu manufacturer 2 see what kind of fan speed is required to run your cpu. it may just be a simple thing like this and your fan cannot cope with the heat generated by the cpu.

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Man.. unless you want to fry your CPU... go ahead with the OverClocking..

That would mean overclock, or else you'll fry the cpu at stock speeds. Not quite true, if cpu's fried everytime someone ran itstock, EVERYONE would overclock,then it wouldn't be overclocking because it would become standard....whew...makingmy head spin :-). ANYWAYS I understand what you were trying to say, though I don't agree at all. My first overclocking project was my 486 DX40 (an AMD chip...cheaper than the slower Intel DX33) I sped it up to a whopping 486DX50...it screamed (at the time) and I thought I was in heaven. Since then I've overclocked several Celerons and AMD chips as well as an occasional p3) my last computer prior to my main computer was a Celeron 600@927MHZ....a whopping %54.5 increas in speed, and that was done with generic pc133 RAM (it was pretty nice though...good chips,gold contacts etc.) and a mid-grade copper heat sink. Despite this it kept cool the whole time even though it was run for weeks at a time sometimes. When it was built it outran most of the P3 machines it was put up against (along with the Guillemont Xentor Maxi-gamer TNT-2 ULTRA video card, it was the ultimate gaming machine for a couple of months...until the Geforce came out). I've OC'd many machines for other people as well (after making them realize that there was no guarentee and certain risks came along with the territory). In all that time I've managed to fry only a single cpu (I always tell people I haven't lost a single cpu but I was reminded the other day that I fried one ON PURPOSE...I wanted to see how much a cpu could handle abuse during OC'ing before it died...I did everything pssible , I didn't ground myself, I didn't check the bond between the heatsink and the cpu, and most importantly I overlcoked in MASSIVE steps..Basically I did every overclcocking no-no). The only other cpu I've lost was due to a lightning hit,couldn't help that one.
The reason people fry thier cpu's during overclocking is because too many people hear about the great increases people get sometimes with thier overclock, and instead of properly investigating how to properly go about an overclocking project, they figure well so-and-so got 1.5GHZ out of thier XP1700+ and they immediately pull out the owners manual to thier mobo and go into BIOS and reset the FSB and/or MULTIPLIER for similar settings. To top it all off they do so with the stock heatsink and fan. I've seen others who fried thier computers because they wanted to OC thier HP/COMPAQ/DELL ETC.which doesn't have the option in BIOS to change either multiplier or BIOS, so they look around the web and find a page on pin mods and attempt to connect the pins underneath and end up shorting out other pins because a stray copper wire ended up touching something else (I bought one Compaq a few years ago on Ubidfor a little oveer $100 for a PII400...I never tired OC'ing it...it wasn't made to do so, and I knew enough to know I'm not comfortable enough doing a pin-mod...most people who have the technical experiance to do a pin-mod aren't OC'ing massproduced machines anyways. I consider myself fortunate to have gotten into OC'ing before it became a big fad. Not that I'm a snob or anything and don't believe N00bs should try thier hand at OC'ing, I just believe too many people try without properly researching the topic and learning how to minimize the risks. In the early days , all OC's had to be done on the motherboard level via jumpers (there were no BIOS controls of FSB/multiplier and especially no control over Vcore VDimm etc.) and since FSB speeds were rather small, so were the jumps. I'd get out a paper and pen and start slowly, raising the fasb, then checking to see if the computer would boot and was semi-stable (I wouldn't run it a full day inbetween so I guess I wasn't checking to make sure it was %100 stable)...if it would boot into BIOS and Winblows, I'd shut it off and try raising the multiplier..marking down each raise in either FSB and/or multiplier...when I figured out the best combination, I'd test it for stability by running it for a full day. If it was %100 stable all was good, if it hadproblems, I'd go in and drop to the next best combination. While OC'ing today is a bit more complex, it's easier at the same time. A lot if not all of those tasks can be done in BIOS so you don't have to touch the mobo at all (which incidentally was far riskier than OC'ing today if only becauseyou were constantly touching the motherboard.). Like I said because it's easier a lot of people figure it's easy and the manufactuerer PUT the option to change the settings there so it must be safe. So while it's easier, I still go through the sometimes tedious task of slowly raising the speed of the CPU instead of in leaps and bounds. Doing it that way, you generally hit a brick wall and the CPU won't even boot into BIOS WAY BEFORE it's in danger of overheating or frying it's insides.). Frankly you generally hit a point where it'll Boot into BIOS but not Windows and stop at that point. Now the user also has to worry about things like Vcore and Vdimm, BUT with a little research, you pretty much know what is a safe level to try and what is way too much. Newer, better heatsinks as well as advances in various technologies have made it easier to keep the cpu cool (in the old days it wasn't too much of an issue, a lot of cpus had really small heatsinks or none at all and no fan, when OCing getting a small heatsink w/fan was more than enough). If I'm on a machine using some form of heatsink and fan, I take that into consideration when I figure the limit of a VCore raising I find acceptable. If it's water, I know I can try more, If I ever got my hands on a phase change cooler or Liquid N2 I'd raise that number even more. I know not to EVEN TRY 2.2V on a heatsink (I don't care what brand/type it is..(.unless I see a WHOLE SLEW of data showing it would keep it cool enough.) Some people try but they're much more likely to fry the cpu. It's all about RISK VS POTENTIAL RETURN ....reducing those risks as much as possible is the key to a successful safe Overclock.

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...

Dude, really.

If at all possible, please break that up into paragraphs so that people will actually take the time to read it instead of seeing that glob of text you call a justification for overclocking.