Why is my Athlon XP Underclocked?

Factual Questions
1

I’ve got an Athlon XP 2100 running on a Gigabyte GA-7VAXP with a gig of PC 2700 ram. Near as I can tell from reading websites, I should be running at 1.73gHz. Instead, I’m running at 1.33gHz. I tried using Gigabyte’s utility to crank up the clock rate, and I don’t think I’ll be trying that again soon. So, what am I doing wrong?

2

It sounds like the Front Side Buss on your computer is set at 100 Mhz. instead of the correct setting of 133 Mhz.
Here is a link to the users manual in PDF format from Gigabyte’s support page (warning large file,slow download on a dialup connection, 5.14 Mb.) http://ftp.gigabyte.com.tw/support/user_pdf/7vaxp_1101.pdf
Everything you need to know to change the FSB speed will be in the manual.
Peace
LIONsob

3

Well, I just tried that according to the manual. I hadn’t done it before, because I thought that all that could be handled through the bios, and I got no satisfaction there. Using their little Easy Tune utility, I crashed hard at the 115 bus speed. But that utility also seemed to crank up other stats proportionately even though I was only telling it to adjust the clock speed. The manual said the worst that could happen was I’d have to reboot. In fact, what happened was that my system files and registries got horked, which corresponded to something I recently read about overclocking RAM causing hard drive problems.

So while I really didn’t want to settle for much less computer than I paid for, I wasn’t going to try anything again until I had something other than my vague understanding of the situation to go on.

It has already made a significant difference in my favorite benchmark, Morrowind.

Thanks a lot for your help.

4

You can’t use intermediate FSBs. You need to jump straight to 133Mhz, otherwise you’ll end up overclocking your PCI and AGP bus, which causes other problems, as you’ve discovered.

5

The gigabyte GA-7AXP board, revision 1.1 and below, have dip switches on the board to select FSB. Consult the manual for the exact positioning, but I think one of the switches has to be set to on and one off to have a 133 FSB.