i'm a newbie.

[Johnny Fist]

I'm running an athalon XP 1700+ on a K7S5A mother board with 512Mb DDR ram with a 300W power supply. According to the maunual for my mother board, its capable of a 266Mhz FSB. When I go into BIOS, the only choices I get are for the CPU are 100/100, 100/133. 133/133. I can only seem to run a stable system at the 100/100 setting. When i check my properties in XP, it tells me that I'm at 1.10Ghz. Correct me if I'm wrong, but shouldn't that say AMD Athalon XP 1700+ and be at 1.7Ghz? I think that I may have accidentally installed the wrong DDR chip. Would that cause my CPU's FSB to drop down to 100 or 133Mhz instead of it's 266Mhz? I mean, is a CPU's FSB and a memory chip's FSB supposed to be equal to each other? Also, a freind told me that DDR memory is supposed to be paired. Is that True? I only installed one chip and it says nothing about pairing chips in my mother board's manual. This is the first time I've built a computer from scratch, so I could really use the help. I figured a forum about overclocking would be a good place to get info on solving this problem. Thanks for your help. :confused:

[SPEEDO]

Your CPU's actual speed is 1.47 MHz.
133/133 is where you want to be.
multiplier of 11

I think this is correct, if not someone will straighten you out shortly.:D

And welcome to sysopt

SPEEDO

[JDT]

You should be set at 133/133. DDR memory does NOT have to be installed in pairs.
My experience with this mobo is that you have to have the updated bios to get it stable. I would also look into a PSU that is more than 300 watts.

[Imperion1]

Speedo and JDT are both correct. Intel's RDRAM were the memory sticks that required being installed in pairs. Except for the older Simms.

[HRM]

There is a good FAQ section about you ECS board here.

http://forum.ocworkbench.com/ocwbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=forum&f=27

That board is very sensitive to PSU supplies.

If you can boot @ 133/133 after removing all extra cards, drives ect..(just leave the video card, hard drive in) then it most likely is a power issue.

[Johnny Fist]

Thanks, I'll post on that board, too. Good idea about removing all the other drives and cards. I never thought about trying that.

[Jimstep]

The 1700+ is the model name, the actual clock cycle is 1467Mhz. The model name is AMD's way of rating the cpu to Intel's cpu's, which is kind of silly, because the AMD running at 1467Mhz will outperform an Intel P4 running at 2Ghz.

The fsb should be 133Mhz. With DDR memory, the system can access the memory twice in the same cycle. So, even though the actual speed is 133Mhz, the memory is rated 266Mhz. The industry uses the PC2100 name which is the bandwidth of the memory; 8bytes (64bit) x 2(per cycle) x 133Mhz equals approximately 2100Mb/sec. This was done because of Intel's RDRAM scheme.

[Johnny Fist]

Just in case anyone cares, I found the problem. I have to fans on this machine. One on the CPU and the other runs off the side of the case. The CPU fan was plugged directly into the motherboard while the extra fan on the case was plugged in directly to the power supply. I simply plugged the CPU's fan directly into the power supply and that seems to have fixed the problem. It was a tip from a coworker. I've had my system running with no problems what so ever for about two hours now. Thanks to all who replied.

[HRM]

Johnny,

you might want to plan for a PSU upgrade in the future, especially if you plan to add anything to the system.