Setting the Front Side Bus on my MB

[picnichouse]

Hi, sorry, this is a basic question, but hopefully someone can give an easy answer...

I recently purchased a barebones athlon system from microcenter. The Front Side Bus on the motherboard only goes up to 200MHz, but all the processors, like the 2600 XP I bought, have a much higher front side bus. What do I do? I set it at the max level on the MB, at 200MHz, but it doesn't seem to work. Should I set it at half the front side bus of the processor (166MHz)?

Thanks...
Andrew

 

[Unit-0]

The core Front Side Bus (FSB) on your Athlon XP 2600+ system is 166mhz. The net FSB is 333mhz, since you're using DDR (double data rate) RAM which supports simultaneous up and down data streams at the same time.

The reason why your system doesn't work when you set your core FSB to 200mhz is either because your RAM or CPU can't overclock that high. Play around with multipliers to find out which is the bottleneck.

 

[Out50Stang]

What if a motherboard supports up to 266mhz FSB, with DDR memory does that mean the FSB is 533mhz, and can utilize, say a Athlon 3200+ XP with a 400FSB?

 

[Unit-0]

What if a motherboard supports up to 266mhz FSB, with DDR memory does that mean the FSB is 533mhz, and can utilize, say a Athlon 3200+ XP with a 400FSB?

That's the problem with advertising, they always show you the bigger number. Motherboards that say 266mhz FSB means its net FSB is 266mhz, which is 133mhz core.

In overclocking, you mess around with the core FSB which in turn changes the net FSB.

EDIT: Athlon XP 3200+ are 400mhz net FSB, which is 200mhz core. You can change the CPU:RAM ratio to 3:2 if you wanted to use RAM in a socket A motherboard that can only go up to 133mhz core.

 

[E4g1e]

Actually, picnichouse, the 200MHz FSB maximum support on your new barebones-system mobo refers to the true FSB clockspeed (effective FSB speed: "400MHz"). Your new 2600+ CPU runs its FSB at an actual 166MHz (effective FSB speed: "333MHz"). Set your mobo's FSB speed to 166MHz, which will correctly run that 2600+.