Help appreciated.

Hi,

This is my first post on these boards, although I have been reading them for some time! Basically I want to ask a few questions about a new PC I have just built, specs below:

Abit NF7-S Motherboard.
AMD Athlon 2500+ barton (AQXFA)
Antex TrueBlue 480w PSU.
Coolermaster Aero 7+ (Copper).
2 x 512 Sticks of Twinmos PC3200 CL2.5 RAM.
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 - 80gb SATA HD.
Sony DWU10A DVD-RW.

(1) From reading reading this board I was under the impression that the 2500+ was a great CPU for overclocking, and that 3200+ speeds where generally easy to obtain by simply upping the FSB to 200. This seemed to be the case when I did just that, however after a short spell in Windows the PC seems to crash to a blue screen. Is this common when an overclock goes wrong or what can I expect if if this is the case?

(2) It appears that all the drivers supplied with my Abit NF7-S board are Windows 2000 drivers. When I install them I get "not certifeid" errors. Can I expect these drivers to be reliable or what drivers would you guys recommend I download (i.e. Chipset drivers, SATA drivers).

(3) I will be using my old Radeo 9500 pro card in this machine until something more appealing comes along. Can anyone recommend a utlity to allow this card to be overclocked and if so what lvl of overclocking I should be looking to achieve?

(4) I ordered the NF7-S v2.0 board but could not see v2.0 printed on the box or the board. Should I expect to see this?


Thanks to anyone who takes some time to read and answer these questions.

just a quickie cos im on the way to the pub :)


1) yes the 2500 is a great clocker, but you might want to give it a lttle more juice ( ie voltage :) ) for it to be happy at 3200 speeds.

You can do this simply enough in the bios, where it will prolly be referred to as 'vcore'. Try raising this to the next step up and run your chip at 'say' 2800 speeds. Run through some intensive tests in windows [sandra burn in or 3d mark] . If all seems stable then move your cpu speed up a notch and repeat.


When you reach a speed that crashes at this voltage - well its up to you - you can either be happy with this speed or you can raise the vcore a littel more and see how far you can go. Remember that more vcore means more heat, so you should use a decent cooler and thermal paste, but you should be fine up to 1.85 volts easily .


2) seems iffy to me - should be xp drivers there somewhere. If not you can get ur nforce drivers at nvidia.com


http://www.nvidia.com/content/drivers/drivers.asp

just select nforce - unified - xp


4) i dont know the answer to this as i dont own one, but if you have the option of setting ur fsb to 200/400 in the bios then you have the v2.0 for sure. TBH v2.0 is all there is out there now as v1.X have been gone for months


hope this helps a little - not as comprehensive as i could be but captain stella is calling me. If you want clarification on something ask, and i'll reply around 11:30 :) complete with spelling mistakes.

take it easy, funnel