Hi guys, Yet another Noob trying to pick your brains.:O I've just been given a load of stuff and have thrown it all together to make quite a nice little PC for my grand-daughter to start off with. Its a Pentium 4 2.6Ghz (Northwood) with 256mb of RAM and a 40 gig HDD mounted on a Epox 4peae motherboard. So far so good.....er no! The mobo sees the CPU as 1.3Ghz and when I go into set-up and change it to 200 and reboot, I end up with no POST and having to take the battery out which puts me back to square one. Can't find a manual for it on the epos site and it's beginning to make me cross. Do what you can for me fellas, I'm supposed to be a hero to this girl!:doh:
Well, a lot of early Northwood's used 100MHz FSB's, but later ones moved to 133. (side note, the P4 architecture uses a quad-pumped FSB off the base frequency of 100/133/200 to get 400/533/800MHz FSB's) If it's at 100MHz, you'll have to adjust the multiplier to 26. If it's at 133, the multiplier needs to be set at 19.5. The CPU voltage may need to be set at 1.5-1.6V if it's not autodetected---but you can find out by checking the PC Health menu in BIOS. Also, what speed RAM do you have? If you have PC2100, then 100MHz and 133MHz will work fine, but you'll have to use an FSB:RAM divider to run these asynchronously. Hope this helps.
Many thanks for that info. The base frequency is indeed at 100mhz. How do I change the multiplier??? I've got PC2700 in there , does that make a difference? J
PC2700 is good for up to 166MHz/DDR333 speeds, so the previous scenario applies. The multiplier adjustment should be in the same section as the FSB adjustments. It may be labled something like CPU Ratio instead of multiplier.
Thanks Mr B. Think I now know where it's come undone. I eventually squeezed a manual out of Epox and on their 'Frequency/Voltage Control' page they have this screen which shows the 'CPU clock ratio' adjustment: and then you have my actual screen in BIOS which has the first line missing and therefore no facility to change the clock ratio.Any ideas mate before I lose the rest of my hair? Thought it may have been a jumper on the board which needed changing, but no such luck. I've got the latest BIOS update on floppy but to be honest I don't really know what to do with it. Any help would be much appreciated. Regards, J
You might try playing with the Memory Frequency option. You might have a 200MHz part after all, and the RAM may be being overclocked higher than it can work at, causing your inability to boot.
I've given up. I think this mobo is just too smart for me, so I've changed to an Asrock I found lying around and it's working ok. Thanks for all your help and time. I really do appreciate you young guys helping out us oldsters. Thanks again, John
