Ordered My XP2000+ Today

[Jerry Jones]

Vroooom!!!

Jerry Jones

[Carl West]

I've been reading here for over a year, everyone's information has let me get One rock solid Amd system working, in the middle of debugging my Athlon machine with a Ecs mb. your tips helped me and maybe this can help back. My beast 1700 xp was locking up during filter intensive renderings. I was able to shift to 100 /133 operation and no problems. As I shifted the bios cpu freqs I cycled thru the options, and noticed for the first time a whole second set with a higher voltage for the cpu 1.744 volts
instead of 1.728 default voltage. Kicked it up and seems to run much happier. Going to try it with a 4 gig file and heavy filtering and see if rolls on thru


Carl

[Jerry Jones]

Let us know how it works out.

The Elite Group board is basically a great board... as that SiS chipset - I'm convinced - is perfect for video editing... GREAT THROUGHPUT.

But there are now newer and more refined SiS 735 boards by Leadtek and Stratitec, in my opinion.

The problem with K7S5A series has been the various board revisions...

The earlier revisions are designed to work with earlier Thunderbird Athlons...

The later revisions are designed to work with the XP Athlons...

So one has to match processor to the specific revisions carefully.

In addition, a huge number of AMD problems can stem from having a wimpy power supply, which is why mine is a 431 watt Enermax.

I have a new power supply on order for a future system that I plan to build... and it's a 500 watt Enermax supply.

Jerry Jones

[Technoid]

Originally posted by Jerrold Jones
In addition, a huge number of AMD problems can stem from having a wimpy power supply, which is why mine is a 431 watt Enermax.

I have a new power supply on order for a future system that I plan to build... and it's a 500 watt Enermax supply.

Jerry Jones

Welcome to the club!

I have been saing that to unhappy AMD users since the Athlon debuted....

Q:
Why did my athlon Mainbord die?

A:
Becaus of your crappy 200w PSU...

[Damascus]

500 watt power supply?! What do you need that for? Dual CPUs and a RAID5 array of X15s?

[Jerry Jones]

Immediately before placing my order, I re-considered and bought a 450watt power supply instead.

Satisfied?

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[Elie]

Jerrold,

Remember when I was so Anti AMD? well I just purchased a dual AMD 1800+ system based on the Tyan 2460 board.

Well all I can say is it rocks

Good Luck with your system!

[Jerry Jones]

Thanks, Elie.

That dual Tyan board has a great reputation.

Jerry Jones

[Graham Meredith]

Elie,
Are you using XP1800 processors on the Tyan, or do you mean MP1800's? The Tyan manual is a bit vague about whether it will only accept MP chips, or whether it will run with ordinary XP's. It would be great if it does!!

Graham

[Greebe]

Maggi's using dual XP 1800+'s on his @work Tyan machine for rendering...

http://forums.murc.ws/showthread.php?s=&threadid=30731

[Greebe]

Graham, to answer your question more specifically, not all XP cpu's will work on SMP mb's like the Tyan... tho there is no difference between them and the MP cpu's. Just that the MP's are certified (much more throughly tested) for use in an SMP rig.


Chances of getting ones that will work fine is better than 90% tho... buy two at the same time which should insure a excellent chance of this working out

[Elie]

You got it Graham, I'm running dual 1800 XP's not MP's on the Tyan 2460 board.

My 2460 detects the dual XP's as MP's and runs perfectly, because to tell you the truth there was no difference between the XP's and MP's like Greebe said.
Plus AMD wan't to make more money on the MP chips

NOTE: The new Tyan XP board called the S2466 will properly detect the right chip and won't run dual XP's if installed.

(That's why I bought the S2460)

[Graham Meredith]

Eile, Greebe, thats great news, thanks! I'm about to build a system with the S2460. XP's will be a fair bit cheaper. Reading up on the specs for the MP chips, the only difference I can see is just that they have a larger cache. I couldn't see why XP's wouldn't run, just because of a smaller cache.

Graham

[Jerry Jones]

Well, I just installed my AMD Athlon XP2000+ on my rev. 4 K7S5A and it runs GREAT!

My Athlon 1.4gHz Thunderbird refused to be stable on the board at 133/133.

The 1.4gHz Thunderbird does, indeed, have issues with the rev. 4 boards, in my opinion.

Thanks to "Mr. Athlon"...

http://www.geocities.com/mrathlon2000/zp.html

"Mr. Athlon" discovered the "Zp, Zn" issue with rev. 4 boards...

Thanks to him, I learned my true options were to either:

1. perform a solder fix on the board so that it would work with the 1.4gHz Thunderbird: http://prohardver.index.hu/download/...uption_fix.pdf

or

2. simply upgrade the processor to an XP.

I did so tonight.

I am delighted to report Mr. Athlon's suggestion has worked beautifully.

The XP2000+ is running happily at 133/133.

I've run the Memtest - 86 with none of the errors that showed up with the 1.4gHz Athlon Thunderbird.

(My 1.4 Thunderbird refused to be stable at the 133/133 bios setting due to the ZP resistor values having been changed on rev. 4 boards in anticipation of the XP processors.)

For details, about Mr. Athlon's findings, visit this forum:

pub65.ezboard.com/bk7s5amotherboardforum

...better yet...

...read this:

http://www.geocities.com/mrathlon2000/

I'm very, very glad I did *NOT* follow the so-called "advice" given on the heavily-censored OC Workbench forum where any mention of Mr. Athlon and his fix is removed from public view.

Had I listened to the prevailing view of the OC Workbench crowd, I would have wasted in the neighborhood of $250 as the prevailing opinion on that forum is that Athlon 1.4gHz problems are mostly caused by inadequate power supplies or bad ram. Even though I explained I was using an Enermax 431 watt power supply and my CPU temperatures were low (Swiftech heatsink) and I was using high quality Corsair DDR PC2100 memory, the individuals on the OC WorkBench forum kept suggesting that I had either a "heat" problem or a "power" problem.

I'm glad I did not listen to them. Instead, I listened to Mr. Athlon and saved $250 and I have a rock-solid-stable PC.

To the folks at OC Workbench: Due to your practice of censoring posts related to this fix, I do not plan to ever visit your Web site again unless you make a sincere and contrite public apology.

Meanwhile, my heartfelt thanks to Mr. Athlon.

My K7S5A is performing flawlessly for video editing and MPEG-2 encoding!

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[Greebe]

Sweet, glad to hear it Jerry