2.8ghz appearing as 2.1?

[hougtimo]

I have this pc to upgrade and it was all going fine. I upgraded the cpu from 1.7 to 2.8 skt 478 p4. Booted fine, checked the speed and it said 2.1ghz. humph. so I upgraded the bios (msi ms-6506) to the latest from packard bell which " adds code for new Pentium 4 and Celeron Processors ". well its still being recognised as 2.1 ghz. Is there anyway at all I can get round this without a new motherboard?

Thanks

HougTimo

[nitroshift]

Check the fsb in bios.

[hougtimo]

I can't as the board is specially manufactured for Packard Bell / NEC so its an OEM board so anything of any use in the bios is hidden

[prx984]

How are you checking the cpu speed? If your checking it with Windows XP's system properties, it's probably incorrect. Get CPUz and try that.

My DELL Latitude PIII 650 with speedstep would only recognize itself as a 500MHz in system properties under XP, but with CPUz it said it was a 650MHz PIII.

[puntoMX]

nitroshift is right, it´s the FSB.

Now it works on 400(100)MHz and it should be on 533(133)MHz FSB.

Isn´t there a BIOS from MSI it self that will give you more options? Or just a modded BIOS?

[DigeratiPrime]

most recent Intel processes use SpeedStep

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpeedStep

likewise AMD processors use Cool'n'Quiet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool%27n%27Quiet

Check Power Options in Control Panel.

[nmX.Memnoch]

My guess would be that the chipset doesn't support the proper FSB for the CPU. It won't necessarily keep it from working. For example, if the motherboard supports Northwood P4's at 400MHz, you can put a 533FSB Northwood P4 on the board but it'll still run at 400FSB.

No amount of BIOS updates will fix that. The only option would be to "overclock" the chipset but that's usually out of the question on OEM systems...which he has.

[puntoMX]

I gues the basic BIOS doesn´t have that option to OC and most 400MHz chipsets will take 125 to 133MHz any way when it normaly runs on 100MHz (and the RAM supports it too ).

[nmX.Memnoch]

Yeah, that's basically overclocking the chipset. However, most OEM BIOS's don't offer any FSB or memory adjustment features. Those are reserved for enthusiast systems.

A guy in the office next to mine put a P4 2.6/800 Northwood CPU in a system that only supported a 400MHz FSB...then came and asked me why the CPU was only running at 1.3GHz! It took me about a half second to realize that it was running at half speed because the FSB was running at half the CPUs rated speed (but full speed for the chipset).