Athlon XP speed question/problem

[Toad]

Well, all reformatted and up and running now. Just didn't bother updating with any form of VIA 4 in 1 drivers and all is well.

I tried flashing the bios and the fail safe defaults but it still ran at 1050.

So I got out the whip and forced it. Set the dip switches on the mobo to 10.5 and 133 and....

Voila.... it's running at 1401 now, temps at 33-34 C at "idle" and 36-37 C under AH load.

Gained about 15-20 frames from what I had in cruise flight.

Thanks to all!

[Toad]

Well, a less enthusiastic review of the situation.

I was looking at the MB temp, not the CPU.

Running at 1400, it idles about 55C and gets on up to 59C in AH


CPU idles at ~ 44C at 1050 now and goes up a few degrees in the game.

Saw some stuttering when at 1400 but it could have been the O/B sound. I cut the DirectX acceleration back to standard and that helped but at the same time I cut the CPU back to 1040. Much smoother now.

Guess I'll run the CPU back up to 1400 and see what happens to the temp again and how it works in the game with just the DX modification.

[Staga]

It's not too hot for the CPU thought it could run cooler. Are you using "boxed" cpu which came with heatsink/fan combo?
Those are not the best coolers you can think of.

Zalman's are pretty good and silent too: http://www.ocworkbench.com/2002/zalman/6500alcu/6500alcup1.htm

There's lots of good choices and I'm sure someone can give good tips. I'm using water so I can't help you with this

edit: use also little bit of silver paste between cpu and heatsink, it alone can drop your temps couple degrees.

[Toad]

Staga, it's the AMD fan that comes with the retail box CPU.

I did put it together with the Arctic Silver. Thin coat, less than the thickness of a piece of typing paper, like the AS website said.

I've been running it at 1400 closed up.. I did have a side panel off before when I was still flipping dips. I've got two 80mm case fans, one in and one out,  plus the power supply fan.

Closing it dropped it a bit. Doing BBS type stuff and WinMedia player, it's at 50C. Goes up to maybe 55C now flying in AH.

That should be OK, right? Does a better fan drop it more than just a few degrees?

System temp (case?) is runing 36C doing this BBS stuff. Light duty, I know.

CPU fan rpm shows ~2450 on the Gigabyte program. It shows 4100 on the Motherboard Monitor progrgam. What's normal? The Gigabyte Hardware Monitor had that alarm defaulted to 3000. Do I need a new fan? Which monitor is right?

[flakbait]

Go into the advanced hardware monitor (or somerthing like that) in your BIOS. That'll have actual fan speeds you can eyeball along with CPU and case temps. A normal XP temp is around 45C, with 55C being the high end. Anything close to 60C is a BAD thing. And if your CPU fan is only turning at 2400 revs I'd replace the sucker. If your CPU fan is the type that connects to your power supply, you might not get an accurate reading. Or you might see the power supply's fan instead of the CPU fan. As a bit of a "no duh", FAN1 should always be the CPU fan.

For a bit of contrast (read: reference) here's my typical temps/RPM...

AMD Athlon T-bird 900MHz 42C under load (checked with MoH:AA)
Case temp ~30C
GlobalWIN CPU fan 4700 RPM (high of 4950, low of 4600. gun oil works wonders)
Generic 90mm case fan ~2400 RPM
Average room temp 65º


-----------------------
Flakbait [Delta6]
Delta Six's Flight School
Put the P-61B in Aces High

[Toad]

Thx, Flak.

I checkd in the Bios and compared to Motherboard Monitor and the Gigabyte EasyTune monitor.

Some big differences.

System Temp:

Bios 36
MBM 36
ET4  36

CPU Fan

BIOS  4821
MBM   4891
ET4 2445  seems ET reads about 1/2 fan speed for some reason

Sys Fan

All show "O". There's no other built in fan on this board, so maybe that's why.

CPU Temp

Bios 51
MBM 0 or -55 (two other readings, both apparently wrong)
ET4 51

Seems it's running a bit hot. Hasn't been 3 days on the Arctic Silver yet tho... bout 1 1/2.

Suggestions?

[Toad]

Well fer the love of pete!

Just looked on the Gigabyte site and the GA-7VAX is supposed to have another fan sitting just south of the cpu. I assume that is the system fan that I don't have. hmmmmmmmmmm.

Back to the shop tomorrow.

[flakbait]

A built-in fan? Just looked up your mobo and that looks like maybe a built-in graphics chip fan in the pic. Both fan pin headers are just above and to the right of the CPU block, so how you got two case fans in there without a fan actually ON the CPU heatsink is beyond me! Then again, putting both fan jacks up there is REALLY dumb. You can only use one for a case fan, assuming the P/S doesn't require one.

As for your temp problem, it doesn't look like much of a problem. 51C sitting still is a tad toasty, but nothing horrid. Now if it jumps up around 58-59C let her cool off some.

The following advice requires a $5 surcharge**

Dump the no-name brand and go with an Asus, MSI, or some other KNOWN mobo. Sure you pay out the nose, but at least you're getting something that works.

End surcharge

Tips for mobo hunting:

1) Direct P/S connection for the CPU fan is a bad thing. Go for another one with a conventional layout. Those fan types are hard to monitor and a PITA (that's pain in the oscar) to work with.

2) Make sure the fan jacks are in a LOGICAL place. One near the lower edge for intake, one near the ATX 14-pin header for exhaust, and one between the CPU and ram slots.

3) Make sure it doesn't require a BIOS flash right outa the box. My MSI (K7T266 Pro2, no longer made) will run an XP1600+ without a flash. An XP 1900+ with flash.

4) Hunt online for tech specs about each mobo model you're eyeballing. You'll actually be able to enjoy the later years, instead of continually mumbling "damn fan jack, stupid BIOS locked up, why's the ram slots between the IDE jacks?"


-----------------------
Flakbait [Delta6]
Delta Six's Flight School
Put the P-61B in Aces High


** residents of planet Earth exempt

[Toad]

I did do some research. This is what Tom's had to say about the 7VAXP which is my board with a RAID controller.

"Gigabyte was able to put on quite a show in our benchmarks, right up there with the Asus board. The manufacturer does not provide any options for changing the settings for memory timing in BIOS (except for selecting the clock); you can only activate a "Top Performance" mode. This was enough to produce respectable results."

Plus, my local shop tech highly recommends them. It is replacing a year old ASUS I had to ship back because one of the RAM slots kept burning up RAM sticks. It'll be back in a few weeks I guess.

My case fans run off a splitter from the Main Power Supply. Just the way the case was set up when I got it from Multiwave.




The missing fan is the one just below the CPU mounting block in this picture. All I have is a little gold heatsink that says "gigabyte". That fan is shown on all the pictures of the 7VA** MB family. It's not graphics, as the VAX has onboard sound only, no graphics.

The CPU fan/heatsink combo is the one shipped with the "retail" AMD XP I bought a year ago. It connects to a MB plug above and to the right of the CPU mounting. In the picture, there's two small white powerpoints just above and left of the top of the RAM slots. The left one is the CPU fan, the right one is labeled System Fan.

My "case fans", though, run off the Main PS splitters. I begin to see part of the confusion. "System fan" must mean"case fan" to the monitor program. My "case fans" do not have that kind of plug..... they have the BIG 4 pin plug, just like a HD.

There is no power jack on my board where the fan labeled "8X" in the picture plugs in.  It's that gold colored fan that I don't have. Since they didn't see fit to put the power connection in, I guess this version of the board doesn't have one; mine's a 1.1 ver.


Anyway, thanks!

[flakbait]

It's no trouble at all Toad!

With your two fans plugged into the P/S I can see where the lack of jacks comes from. As for that fan, I believe it's the DDR chip. I've got a similar little gold block on mine (and in the same place your's is in) without a fan, and it says "MSI DDR" on it. Though why you'd stick a fan on the thing is beyond me; it don't get all that warm.

Wait a bit on the CPU temp and see if it comes down any. 51C at idle isn't too bad, but it's not great either. I'm startin to think you might of gotten hosed on it too. Some simple stuff you can check for cooling is...

1) Make sure the heatsink fan is blowing in the right direction. It should be blasting air down against the heatsink block, not drawing air up from it. Reversing my fan, so it sucked hot air up from the heatsink, caused a 5 degree jump in temps.

2) You might try reversing the intake fan so it only blows air out. This forces air to come in through all the vent slots. Whether or not it'll work? *shrug*

3) Kinda obvious here, but if you've got a heating vent right near the system, close it off. That'll play merry hell with your temps.

4) Keep the computer room cooler than the rest of the house. You can also crack a window or stick a little office fan near it for better airflow.


That's about all I can come up with, short of a case mod. If you'd like to hear it I'll post the sucker (you'll need dryer ducting, a high-speed fan, and a good grinder)

Hope some of this helps!

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Flakbait [Delta6]
Delta Six's Flight School
Put the P-61B in Aces High

[eagl]

The fan cools the heatsink on the "north bridge" which includes such things like the memory controller, pci bus controller, and a few other low-level things like that.  This fan is not always necessary unless you are overclocking or otherwise pushing your system beyond "normal" usage.

In fact, if the board shipped without a fan, your motherboard will of course be quieter because fans make noise.  Certainly the lack of a fan there should not affect the bus speed, although it might limit overclockability in certain circumstances.

I suggest plugging at least the cpu fan into the motherboard fan header so you can run a monitoring program and have it cause an alarm to go off if the fan stops spinning, and you may also wish to have at least one of your case fans hooked up to a motherboard header so you can monitor their speed as well.  Some power supplies throttle the power supply fan based on temperature, and they will have a little 2 or 3 wire plug that should also be plugged into a motherboard fan header so you can monitor the power supply fan speed.  If any fan fails, the monitoring program can give an alarm or even shut down the computer to prevent overheating.

If you care about overclocking and motherboard performance, hit http://www.anandtech.com and http://www.hardocp.com for their motherboard reviews.  I also strongly suggest getting a high performance heatsink if you plan on overclocking.  I use an SLK-800 heatsink (http://www.hardocp.com top performer) not because of overclocking, but because it lets me get high air flow using a quieter 80mm fan instead of a smaller and louder 60mm fan like most CPU heatsinks use.

[Toad]

For a test, I reset the Mobo dip switches to auto and let it run at 1040 instead of 1400 which is what  it does in auto.

Idle temps dropped to 43C and maybe 48C running AH.

There's something up with that chip. As I said, the AMD box was all sealed with the official seals and it said it was a 1600+.

But it truly is a Athlon 1 gig trapped in an XP 1600+ body is my guess.

I wrote AMD tech support to see if they want to do anything about it. If not.. no biggie. The AMD chips aren't that expensive and I need another one anyway. This one will just be in my son's computer... mine will be a 2000

[eagl]

Have you tried the cpu in a different brand mobo to see what it detects at?

48C isn't bad for an athlon.

[Toad]

Yep. This cpu was in a pretty good ASUS before this and it showed as 1G in that one too.

It runs cool at 1050 and runs significantly hotter at 1400 in this Gigabyte MB.

It would never even boot above 1G in the Asus.

[TIGS]

An Gigabyte GA-7VAXP mobo pic? cool.... WAIT, that's what I have here!!! LOL!

I'm surprised you're experiencing cpu overheating problems with the board, maybe an extra application of the thermal grease might help, that or getting rid of the fan you have there and get what I got for my 2000+ (1.67 GHz to you dweebies that don't understand AMD) , a ThermalTake Volcano 9 CoolMOD fan, and the computer under load only goes up to 49°C - that's pretty good compared to my fiancee's 1800+ with the boxed cpu, which goes up to 52°C on a Epox 8KHA+ board.

Oh yeah, what I did do to the thermaltake fan, I set it up to full speed, and its advertised full speed is 4800, but mine runs like a jet engine, propelling at 5000-5200 RPM, which helps a lot, but of course there's that fan noise. There's one thing I have an advantage of with this setup of this computer (using an Antec-like case, 3 fans (with blue leds) in it - the advantage goes to my "Deafness" - thank god.

Besides, I didn't finish reading through the post when I typed this out, so I'd assume that you've got the problem fixed, hopefully.

Oh yeah, not sure when I'll be back up into the virtual skies again - maybe after I get the GeForce FX for my board (GF4Ti4200 now) in Jan or February, and maybe 2800+ sometimes in between, who knows. That would finish up my dream machine by then.

TIGS

System Config in an Aspire TurboServer Case (Aluminum color, similar to Antec w/ Side window):

Gigabyte GA-7VAXP
ThermalTake Volcano 9 CoolMOD H-S/Fan on AMD Athlon 2000+ 1.67 GHz CPU
512 MB 333 MHz PC2700 ValueSelect Corsair CAS 2.5 RAM (2 sticks, 256 ea)
PNY Tech GF4 Ti 4200 64 MB using AGP 4x (mobo can do 8x)
Maxtor 40 GB 7200 RPM ATA133 Hard Drive running Win XP Home Ed.
TDK VeloCD 48x16/24x48 CD-Burner
56x CD-ROM drive
3 Antec Blue LED Fans for System fans
Some cheap-prettythang modem I bought at Wal-Mart that I haven't used yet. :-D (have DSL here.. hehe)