Motherboard Mod

[lynx]

Ever had that problem where you want to upgrade, but your motherboard won't support the later processors ? I had exactly that problem, I have an MSI K7T266 Pro2 (MS6380v2) motherboard, which according to MSI will only support Palomino processors at best, which means that my max upgrade option is XP2100+. But of course the Thoroughbred range overlaps the Palomino range, so the best Palomino I have seen is the XP1900+, and since I already have the XP1700+ there's no incentive to go that way.

My next option was to look at overclocking, I decided to check it out with my current processor, then if successful try to find a XP2100+ palomino. But first I needed extra cooling without deafening myself, so I got a big heatsink, with a big but lower speed fan. Oh dear, my bios did not recognise the relatively low speed fan, so back to the MSI web site for a bios upgrade.

While I was there, I was browsing the forum for articles relating to my motherboard, and I came across one asking why this board doesn't support Thoroughbred, but the Pro2A board (with the same chipset) does. The reply pointed to another thread about how to make this board recognise the Thoroughbred chips. To cut a long story short, I upgraded my bios, then after a bit of hesitation, I bought a XP2400+ Thoroughbred. This afternoon I took the plunge and got out my soldering iron. All that was required was to remove a single surface mount capacitor.

An hour later (I took the opportunity to reroute disk cables behind the motherboard to prevent obstruction), I was ready to boot up. To my horror, the first think i saw was XP1800+ displayed as the processor type. But I went ahead and entered the bios settings, then rebooted. It still says XP1800+, but the next screen says 2000MHz which is the correct speed for the XP2400+.

If anyone has the same board, I can let them have details of the mod (the old processors still work apparently). But the real lesson is not to assume that because the manufacturers say it doesn't work, that there is no alternative but to buy a new board - search for alternative solutions.

Edit: and for all those of you who say AMD's run hot, it is running quite happily at a nice cool 35C

[Evil Gemini]

I dont get it how can removing a capacitor allow the board to accept a Thoroughbred range cpu ?

What did you replace the capacitor with ?

[_John_Lennon_]

Originally posted by neattairoski@11 September 2003 - 20:57
I dont get it how can removing a capacitor allow the board to accept a Thoroughbred range cpu ?

What did you replace the capacitor with ?
Yeah, same here.

And btw, for the record, my AMD, that I love, and is overclocked to hell, IS running hot, at like 49-58 at idle to full load. Of course, if I take off the case side, thats -2 degrees, and if i move it off my floor thats another minus 2.

But then again, the 50 range is perfectly within the running limits.

[lynx]

You don't replace the cap with anything, you just remove it. I haven't heard for definite what it actually does, but I got the impression it was something to do with core voltages. There were 25 pages of posts on this topic, I couldn't be bothered to read them all to find out if there was a full explanation.

Tried a sandra burn in test last night (just ones that kept the processor running at 100% for 20 minutes) and the temp climbed to 38.5C :lol:

My old XP1700 processor used to run at 43-48C, but it didn't have anything like the cooling I've got now.

Edit: Forgot to mention that the bios was tweaked to give the capability to recognise different multipliers etc, since it was primarily sold as an overclockers board and there are ways of setting different multipliers by closing various bridges on the Palomino chips, which is why 15x133MHz actually works, but it doesn't call it the XP2400+