here's my specs: AMD 2100+ XP Gigabyte Ga7-VA, KT400 chipset 2 x 256 DDR pc2700 ram Volcano 7 Heatsink/fan GF4 mx440 64mb video card dvd/cdrom 40gb maxtor hdd 20gb seagate hdd 300w power supply i've recently bought the processor/ram/fan/mobo, and can only run the fsb at 100mhz....giving me the equivalent of an XP 1500, anything higher, and windows xp won't load...(or wouldn't even load setup when i was trying to install), would a higher power supply solve this, as i can't see any other reason for the failure, and i don't wanna fork out for one if i don't need it anyonce know this???
A 300W power supply may work with that---if it's a good brand, like Sparkle or Antec. I've got one box with an XP2000+ overclocked to 2200+ speeds with 1.9 volts, an OC'd Radeon 8500, an 80mm fan on my heatsink in addition to a hard drive and CD-ROM. This is a stable system, due to a high quality power supply. The Sparkle 300W that I have in that setup put out 200W between the 3.3 and 5V rails. I would try to setup XP with a minimal amount of parts and see if things get better. Also, watch your temps as heat can also be a factor here. That Volcano 7 may not be enough to properly cool that 2100+ I have one, but I bought a better heatsink when I got my XP2000+ since it was only cooling my 1.2GHz Duron moderately. I'd start to consider a better cooling solution if your temps run 55*C or greater at idle. You should be able to see this info in BIOS.
whats are the temps ure getting @ xp 1500? I have a volvano 9 and xp 1500 oc/ to 1,5ghz and when I leave my pc at night on(so its idleing) and put my fan @ 2000rpm I get 30c' (86 fahrenheit) so the volcano 9 is a damn good cooler when I had some coolermaster cooler that came with my pc it always was above 45c' I dont c many athlons these days running at 30c' unless they r watercooled I would say buy a volcano 9 and even it still doesnt work it will be much quiet and it cools better though u can try to startup with all the unecessary hardware out of the box so if it wud be ure power supply it shud work then
currently, my temp is at 45 degrees (celcius), with the fan running @ 4800 rpm (median setting on the volcano speed switch)....i don't think i've seen it go past 55 degrees, definately not past 60 at this point in time, although it's only been running for a week now. I'm yet to do some proper benchmarking on it, and was thinking of running a prime95 test on it soon. Anyway, as i had trouble installing a fresh copy of win xp on it, all i had plugged in was my gfx card (actually used a tnt2 m64, cos i thouhgt my gf4 was bung at first), one of my 2 hdds and cdrom....and it had the same results: stop errors, nothingness and stuff... my box is the oldest piece of harware now, so i'd say that might fix it, we'll see, it's the only logical option left oh yeah, about the cpu overvoltage settings in BIOS, when's this usually used?
When overclocking. If your CPU voltage isn't running at 1.75 or around there (due to fluctuations), that could be a problem too. The RAM could also be a problem if it's been accidentally branded at a higher speed than it's rated for.
"The RAM could also be a problem if it's been accidentally branded at a higher speed than it's rated for." --- Big B What does that mean? If you buy a PC3200 stick for example, and its actually only PC2700? Can you have "too" much power? I'm not talking about a power surge. I mean, can your power supply be too much? Is that possible? Or is it just a matter of how much you can use, and any extra just wouldn't be used? For example, a 450Watt power supply in a mere 533Mhz processor with a single little 256SDRAM stick and a 32MB video card... etc.. Would there be any negative results to having way more power than needed?
Yes, something like a PC3200 stick being mislabled as a PC2700 stick. You can have too large of a power supply, but it won't damage your system. Instead you'll have wasted a lot of money.
