Strange issue with Asus P2B-D

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BigBadBiologist

2[H]4U
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Mar 19, 2001
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So I bought a Asus P2B-D a while ago in a box-o-stuff deal and just recently got around to playing with it. Officially, the board revision that I have only accepts older PIII CPUs that have >=1.8V Vcore. I got a pair of PIII800s @ 1.7V so it wouldn't POST. But, there is a trick where you can tape/connect pins to force a higher Vcore. So I did this with one of the CPUs and the board POSTed no prob. When I stick the second CPU in (unmodded), the BIOS and XP sees both CPUs and the proper speed is detected.

However, the system seemed really slow, so I benchmarked it (Sandra) and it benchmarks slower than a PIII 500.

Has anyone ever seen anything like this before?
 
Check your FSB speed.
Normally when a system is running slow like that then the either the FSB is running slower than spec or what the CPU's run at.

Luck.......... :D
 
yeah, it's definitely 100. The board has jumpers to set FSB and all diagnostic software shows it at 100. Even if it was at 66, it would be @ 528MHz and benchmark faster than a 500 (or at least close to it)

I think I have it narrowed down to 2 possibilities:
1. The Vcore is detected in Sandra as 1.96V. I'm not sure how that would affect performance aside from overheating/blowing up the CPUs. But the CPUs are not getting warm. I wonder if I need to do that pin mod on both CPUs.
2. Maybe the BIOS isn't correctly using the cache. I'm going to disable cache in the BIOS and see if the system still benchmarks the same.
 
So I pulled CPU2 (the unmodded one) and CPU1 benchmarks exactly where it should. I guess I am going to have to mod CPU2 and see if that fixes the issue.
 
I think I figured it out. The default XP install made the PC type ACPI multiprocessing system. I changed it to MPS multiprocessing system and it works great. Very quick setup indeed! :)
 
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