New MB and CPU

Well, picked up an Asus K8N board and Sempron 3100+ today for fairly cheap. This is going to replace my aging K7S5A board and AthlonXP 1800+. Also picked up a gig of Corsair ram (DDR400), so hopefully this will add a bit of life into my computer. The K8N still sports an AGP slot, which sucks, but I didn't have the money for a PCI-E video card anyway. Apparently the K8N has some overclocking abilities, but I doubt I'll mess with it too much since I'm not a heavy OC'er.

Eh, I know this hardware is old already, but its light years ahead of my current desktop (see above), so I'm fairly happy, plus it will amount to one more system Folding for CyberIT.

Yeah, that isn't that bad. Does that Semp happen to be 64bit?

Last edited by ChrisMG on Tue Jun 27, 2006 2:35 am; edited 1 time in total

Yeah, its a Sempron64 socket 754, which again is old, but way better than my current setup...or at least one of my current setups.

I guess another good thing about the K8N mobo is that it also supports Athlon64s. It doesn't exactly say how high it can go though. I'm assuming it supports the highest socket 754 model, maybe the 3400+ 2.4Ghz Newcastle (or the 3200+ 2.2Ghz Venice core) I think? So I could always just get a better processor.

Found this site and thought it was interesting. I guess the Semp 3100+ isn't 64 bit even though it claims \"Sempron64\".

Wow, I didn't know that. I'll have to do some more reading up on that.

Yeah, came as a surprise to me as well.

Last edited by Josh on Thu Jun 29, 2006 8:32 am; edited 1 time in total

The guy here http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/201 has a good idea. Try running CPU-Z to verify that it doesn't show x86-64.

Well, I planned on doing that anyway along with SuperPI, but I haven't even had time to switch out the boards yet. Anyway, I'm waiting on the ram from Newegg, should get here today, but I probably won't be able to work on it until the weekend, just too busy with work and all. When I get it all put together I'll post the CPU-Z findings.

Thanks for the link Josh. I hope it's 64, but I have a feeling it's not.

Last edited by ChrisMG on Fri Jun 30, 2006 5:44 pm; edited 1 time in total

I guess by stroke of luck I ordered the Palermo core instead of the Paris core. According to many websites that I found, the Palermo cores have had the 64-bit instructions enabled on them since June of 2005 whereas the Paris cores never had them enabled.

So yay, it IS a 64-bit capable processor. The only thing thats upsetting for me though is that apparently, I can't run my memory in dual channel with socket 754. Or more accordingly, the Nvidia Nforce3 chipset doesn't support it so my Asus K8N isn't capable of dual channel. Since the chipset doesn't support it, the dual channel memory controller would need to be embedded on the processor itself and the only processors that sport this are the Athlon 64s. (and for some reason, my DDR400 is only running at 333Mhz, probably because they're single sided chips) Bummer. But thats ok, the Palermo 3100+ is capable of a mean overclock, up to 2.52Ghz on stock cooling, or so I've heard. At least I have a decent board to play with as well since I can change all of my settings asynchronously.

Last edited by Josh on Fri Jun 30, 2006 11:10 pm; edited 1 time in total

Sweet! Are you going to put that 64bit to use (Vista or XP-x64, or some 64bit Linux), or is just nice to have because you'll have it for some time possibly in the future?

Yeah, I'd love to test drive Vista, but I don't know how to get a copy and I guess I'm just too lazy to find out.

On a sidenote, I have the Sempron running at an extremely stable 2.115Ghz right now, and all I've changed so far is the FSB frequency. I'm pretty sure that if I get close to 250Mhz on the FSB, I'll have to play with the ram since at that speed it would essentially be running at DDR500 speeds. I can't believe how cool these things run. I thought about using my AthlonXP as a spare space heater in the winter sometime, but this Semp is just absolutely cool.

Last edited by ChrisMG on Sun Jul 02, 2006 1:47 am; edited 1 time in total

Well, the preview for Vista is closed. Nuts. Thanks for the link anyway though.

Its not a bad OC, but I'd like to push it farther. I know its capable of 2.5Ghz on air cooling alone, but it involves changing a few other options in the Bios, namely the memory divider and vcore. When I get some time, I'll play with it. And yeah, it was running at 333, but now it's up to around 370.

That's too bad. I'll put it up somewhere, and then you can download it. Because, all the keys are good for 10 computers, so I've got keys for 19 computers (since I got 2).

Right on, I'd appreciate that. I have a little 10g drive that I can throw it on too. I'm wondering it it would install on a slaved drive or does it have to be master.