After searching and searching for an answer, can i? how do i? etc… Finally after several attempts I got real success beyond what I had hoped.
First, I got some super glue. Inherited an amd athlon xp 2100+ from a downed pc. and pulled out my old amd athlon 750 box.
To my surprise, the athlon xp fit, and booted. but only running at 1300mhz (needed 1733 for the 2100+) I tried running up the fsb to 132, the bios max and no real success. either no boot, or slower than a 486 dx 33 with win 98 on it. no good.
My first step was a bios update, that was a chore on its own, but after nearly wiping out the mb, i had success. now it read the actual mhz as 1300 at least.
well, to bake it down , this board (an azza that has no more support) wont take me to the 132 mhz fsb because nothing else on the board will handle it. so i need the multiplier to go to 17. in the mean time, i tested the amount of head room i could get on my sys, running up to 110 with pretty fair results, but on the edge of the limits of the pci bus, which is no good to the hard drive and pci devices, such as ethernet cards, sound devices, etc.
Now, I backed the bios to defaults. unplugged all, pulled the cpu. I went to L4 and filled the two lazer cuts with good ol super glue, then i cut through one and used a pencil to connect another to look similar to this (.–||) thats it. forget L1 cause the bios wont let you change anything on the multiplier, nor will the board. only fsb… finally, boots with 1700mhz . thats what ya want for the xp2100+ and i got it, yay, now can i just leave it alone… not at all.
since i already tested up to 110 fsb, i was sure a step up to 106 on this processor would be a breeze if the processor could cope. and it did… no prob at all. 106 gave me good benches, fairly equal to a 2100+ at the 133/266 bus with pc2100 and i only have 512 megs of pc133. the pci bus is running at a cool 35mhz and i have had good results at 39mhz to 40mhz. the agp is very happy at 4x (if you do have probs its sometimes a plus to bring agp back to 2x to get more headroom) and at the 106 fsb thats 212 ddr for the processor. not state of the art, but respectable. so, at 1700mhz it benched fairly weak against the xp2000+, but with a little overclock on the fsb, i am quite happy to have the same power as you would expect from this processor on a new board with new ram, without the cost and on a motherboard that was destined for the junk pile… thats good no matter how ya look at it
a little update:
i temporarily had my vcore available in bios under frequency/voltage. it vanished again. i suspect once i get some conductive paint/ink that it will reappear. The pencil lead just barely gets it done. i will also close all the L1 bridges at that time and double check L4 where I cut the second bridge to make sure it isnt sneaking a connect.
I did back the fsb back to 102 now, windows xp was taking a nose dive at 106 when i ran sisoft. I will bring it back up to 106 once I have the proper bridge connections.
I hope this helps and gives hope to those of you with an old AZZA motherboard. Yes… we can. lol. Be simpler if AMD/INTEL would stop trying to micromanage its consumers
