Asrock K7VT4A PRO - What chipset?!?!?

Hi there,

I've been happily running a Sempron SocA 2500 on the Asrock K7VT4A PRO MoBo for over a year. Recently I've been poking around to see a bit more on what makes it tick so that potentially I might upgrade the CPU to the best the SocA can do when I can get them cheap on ebay.

Anyway, I downloaded CPU-Z just to confirm chipset etc. The Asrock K7VT4A PRO is supposed to have the KT400A North bridge (max FSB 333), however, CPU-Z reports my MoBo as having a KT600 North bridge. This may change things a bit as the KT600 can apparently support a 400 FSB thus allowing me to get the (rare) Athlon XP 3000+ 400FSB model.

Does anyone know if this is correct, or whether CPU-Z is mis-reporting? Did Asrock make some of these boards with a KT600 chipset by mistake/ on the quiet instead of the KT400A chipset? (the manual etc all states it has the KT400A chipset, just CPU-Z reports otherwise).

Also, if I ever did upgrade, and saying I could shift the FSB to 400MHz, can I keep te RAM at 333MHz as I've only got 2700 DDR. Ie I know you can have your RAM running faster than your FSB, but can you also have it running slower?

Cheers for your help!

AFAIK, the only difference between the KT400 & the KT600 chipsets were the ability to support FSB400 CPUs. A lot of utilities report these chipsets as KT400/KT600.

Chances are its a KT400, and CPU-Z is wrong. To confirm, try upping the FSB in BIOS to 400 (probably listed as 200). Hopefully if it is like the ASUS BIOS, it will be listed like the following:

200/33
OR
200/40

If it's the first one, the PCI bus is running at the correct speed (33) and your good to go. If its the latter one the PCI bus is overclocked to 40 which will corrupt your OS install. Do not attempt to boot if its the latter.

As for the RAM question, FSB400 with DDR333 works ok on VIA chipsets, but not well on nForce2 boards (big performance hit).

Cool, thanks for the imput!