Something I forgot to investigate. Athlon Mobile voltages on normal mb.

[Nazo]

I don't know why, but I completly forgot to investigate just how a mb not explicitely made to support the mobiles handles one. I've already ordered an Abit NF7 to replace this peice of junk because it's very nice for the price level ($67 new, as low as $45 or so refurbished, though they didn't have any refurbs listed or available when I ordered and I wanted something this important to be new anyway.) I told my dad which CPU I was planning on getting later, the Athlon Mobile 2600+, but I wasn't really planning on getting it for a long time yet as I don't particularly have a lot of money. As most of you know, those things are made to run at 1.45V or so. I seriously doubt that with my only semi-decent cooler (well, at least it has a copper CORE) would even post if the motherboard defaults to 1.70V or something like that (this is the lowest I know of normal Athlons using, though I'm not certain.) The thing is that he apparently decided as a sort of gift to get it for me and I think he has even already ordered it. Is there any chance the NF7 can autodetect enough to know to use lower voltages? Or can it at least be manually set to a safely low voltage (I've read about some people using in the area of 1.65)? I'll still have my current CPU so I can boot it up normally and change any necessary settings, then shutdown and switch if that's necessary. I'm hoping it can autodetect or something so if I ever have to reset the CMOS then I'll be ok. I'm sorry for asking this simple question here, but it's hard for me to find a direct answer online (the only real source I know beyond here is just googling it to death and mainly I just find posts in forums about people's overclocking jobs.) Besides, I want the opinions of hardware enthusiats -- the kind of people who aren't afraid to set their vcore up a little bit -- rather rather than the kinds who will say that not only should you never run a cpu at a higher vcore, but you shouldn't put a mobile on anything that wasn't directly made for it. I would have investigated this sooner, but I thought I had plenty of time and just had to get rid of this crappy mb with it's 133 FSB (memory is 1:1, it's not capable of better, thank god it's at least DDR,) AGP 4x, and so on like that.

EDIT: BTW, sorry if I posted in the wrong forum, but it's kind of a mixture of CPU, motherboard, and overclocking(ish) related. I figured this question fits general hardware better than those others I think.

EDIT2: Well, ok, I didn't even see that there was one specific to "AMD mobos." Lol, all this time and I never even knew this forum was here. Oh well, sorry. This is definitely better than general hardware though for such a thing.

 

[Nazo]

Geez, now, wait a minute, doesn't anyone know about this? Surely some of you run such a setup?

 

[Kingofl337]

An Athlon Mobile will run fine on a normal MB. For AMD a Mobile and Desktop CPU are the same. The Mobile just run at a lower voltage.

Default voltage is determined by the CPU not the MB.

 

[Nazo]

An Athlon Mobile will run fine on a normal MB. For AMD a Mobile and Desktop CPU are the same. The Mobile just run at a lower voltage.

Default voltage is determined by the CPU not the MB.

Thanks for the help. Finally I'll be upgrading to a decent system.

 

[Falls Included]

yeah.. my 2400 defaults to 1.575 on my nf7-s... keep in mind also, that my board undervolts by .04 volts, so its actually at 1.535... and when i run it at stock 3200, i let it at stock voltages too, or 1.65..(1.61 really). when i OC it up to 2.4 i bump it up to 1.875 (i should have gotten a 2600...) for stability, and its actually at 1.835 (its still a decent OC). it can go higher too... i just dont want to go any higher on the vcore... as i dont want to fry the chip. i dont wanna stress my ram either.

to run it at 166 or 200 fsb you will have to raise the voltage though. the defaul config is at 1.8ghz, but it 133x 14 or whatever it is. simply bump it up to 166x11 for 2500 stock or 200x11 for 3200

 

[Nazo]

I noticed that board can go up to 300. Is there any way to get things running at that? After all, the FSB is actually the most important of all the clocks, so a FSB of 300 would just rule. (Which intel has shown they believed in.)

I'm replacing the chipset hsf with a vantec iceberq 4 btw. Those things are pretty nice. They truly are a copper alloy as nearly as I can tell, and they have better fins/etc than most hsfs intended for things like that. I'm using one of those on my video card. True, it's a 9600 so runs cool, but, even so, when the fan goes off on the hsf because of my lovely wiring skills (hopefully not ever again,) the pc still runs a while without any artifacts if I'm not gaming.

 

[jovetata]

it would be nice if these boards could do anywhere near 300, but alas... no. if that board ur getting can do 260+ ill buy it from u for a premium.

 

[archevilangel]

300 is damn near imossible from what I've seen, Highest I've seen 260, and I consider myself lucky to do 240, (250 crashes during boot of windows, but I think thats because of my memory timings and ch5 ram, if I had bh5 it could probably handle it)

 

[Nazo]

Ok, thanks for the info. I'll, of course, do my own testing to see what I can come up with, but, now I'm setting realistic goals. Hopefully, if nothing else, it will at least run more stable once I replace the chipset hsf with the good one I have coming. I'd like to think I can at least get a little more out of the thing that way though. Those things may be cheap, but, as nearly as I can tell, they truly are made of a copper alloy relatively high in copper. When I was filing down the one for my video card it got hot a LOT faster than normal metals did when I try that sort of thing. Darned things say 9600 Pro in the supported list, but, what they refused to take into account is that the 9600 has the GPU lower on the card than most, so such a large hsf tends to stick out too close to the AGP slot and/or nearby capacitors. If you arrange it just right, it fits, but, I figured why not just file down a few mm or so so it doesn't stick out so much. This is partially because once I stupidly put it on a bit too far out and it was so tight against the slot that eventually one of the springs holding it popped out. I was scared sick my video card had somehow been damaged, but, luckily, the 9600 can take some serious abuse because it took me a while to figure out what was going on to fix it. Plus, I really don't like the way companies design the fins on those cheapo aluminum stock things. Every one of them just has these big flat things that will hold more air in than they let out, defeating the purpose. Proper fins like those on a iceberq are a lot of thin but long things so the air flows easily. If nothing else, I just want to have something decent on there.

Man, just thinking of how much better games will run, and how much higher I can set quality settings in ffdshow when I get these new components installed this weekend is making me a little antsy. More than twice the CPU speed (barton is better than t-bird by a good bit, so even at less than twice the clock it should be more than twice the power I would guess, and this is before ocing of course,) agp 8x at last (I was always dissapointed in how poorly this card seems to be doing in my system. I now wonder if that's because it was designed for 8x instead of being one of those where they really design for half the speed it can do,) dual channel memory surely, higher fsb, memory running at actual full speed (400MHz unless I can oc a bit, as opposed to 145, maybe even 133 if my suspicion about this board is correct,) and a bunch of other things like that. Arg, I can't wait any longer.

EDIT: BTW, while on these sorts of subjects, would anyone know more about the memory? I don't know much about the different types to be honest. Since the best I would ever have was PC2100 really (even this was being run as PC2100) I really never had much interest in finding out more. So I really don't know bh5 from ch5 or whatever. This memory did come with heatsinks however, which I take for a pretty good sign since it implies support of overclocking/etc, however, this was bought around the time that PC3200 was some of the best out there, so it might actually mean they had to push the limits so much it needed heatsinks just to get up to the desired speed... Anyone have any idea if I can get much out of this stuff? I'm 99% sure that this is the ram I have:
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=20-144-304&depa=0
However, still bear in mind this stuff was made back when PC3200 was the latest and greatest. I think it would be neat if I could safely get it well over 400 or something to make FSB overclocking all the more reliable. If I can't, maybe one of these days I need to plan on getting better memory or at least one of those active coolers. I noticed a few reviews said it only ran stable at PC2100 speeds for them. And I remember my dad had all sorts of stability issues even at PC2100 (which is why he gave them to me in trade for my real PC2100) but he was a special case since he bought a brand new asus p4 mb that was using something really new for the time, maybe one of those that do the 800 quadrupled fsb or whatever, I can't recall exactly. I figured it was more due to the mb or something, but I don't know for sure. It does run stable even with my FSB oced to 145 on this system however. The thing is, I have a strong suspicion that this system actually has some kind of memory clock locking to keep the memory at intended speeds, even though it's currently set to HCLK in the speed settings. That may not be true, but, the bios reports it as running at 266MHz, so I worry. I mean, it could just be something they forgot to program in there, so it only reports that it's running at a base of 133 instead of 100.