Vcore on K7S8X v3.01 Bios 2.20 ?

[Hinton]

I just traded my old KT133a motherboard for the one mentioned in topic, since my friend needed a motherboard with SD-RAM slots. Lucky me [img]smile.gif[/img]

Anyway, my question.

Which voltage options will I have, only +5%, or can I set the voltage freely?

How will the board react to a CPU that requires 1.45v? I hope I'll be able to set such a CPU to 1.75+ and not just 1.45 + 5% :(

[RayvenX]

That's what pin mods are for ;)

[Hinton]

So, I'm basicly stuck at +5% unless I do hardware modding? :(

Pinmoding, is that on the CPU or motherboard?

I guess there must be a way to mod ie. a XP-mobile into a Barton (for the added voltage).

[Frankie]

you can do pin-mod on motherboard or on cpu. Pin-modding cpu is easy: you have only to connect 2 or more pins with a thin copperwire (you can take it from a old psu).

[Tuvoc]

You'll certainly need to ramp up the FSB to notice any improvement.
I went from an Abit KT7A KT133A (brilliant board) to a K7S8X, and retained all of the same components except the RAM. I noticed no difference in performance at all (XP2000+)
Of course when I put a 166FSB Barton 2500+ in there things improved a bit.

[Hinton]

Mostly I'm just after the DDR-ram, will purchase a 1gig pc2100 block (gotta make it hit pc2700 speeds ;) ).

I'll upgrade my 1gig Thunderbird to a 1666mhz Thorton (and OC that too ofcourse). Will be nice [img]smile.gif[/img]

[Tuvoc]

Well, what I was saying was that DDR-RAM at 133FSB isn't noticeably quicker than PC133 SD-RAM

The benefits from DRR-RAM are really only evident when you get to 166, 200 FSB and beyond - which is what you are planning. Hope it goes well

[Hinton]

Why wouldn't it be? It ought to be 2x as fast.

[Tuvoc]

Well, for example, nforce 2 dual channel DDR memory is twice as fast than singe channel DDR isn't it. But that doesn't make an nforce2 machine twice as fast does it. You're lucky if you see 3-5% improvement.

Trust me, as I said, I went from an Abit KT7A with 512MB PC133 to an Asrock K7S8X with 512MB DDR-RAM, retaining my XP2000 and everything else. I did NOT notice any increase in performance.

[Hinton]

I think the dual Nforce2 doesn't do much because the CPU can't use all that bandwidth. However a SD-RAM system is definetly bandwidth starved, and as such I'll see a huge difference between SD-RAM and DDR-RAM, even if it's at PC2100.

Wont hurt having 1GB instead of the measly 384MB I have now ;)