gballard

Does anyone out there have this motherboard or one in the KD7 family? I am having major issues getting the BIOS to see my CPU correctly. Just shoot me a private message or respond here and I will give ya the details..

Nitris

I have a KD7A board

I installed the Athlon chip no problem and it was my first time. Have you checked if it fits tightly?

gballard

oh i know it was in there snuggly. the problem started when I noticed that it was registering as a 1500+ instead of the 2600+ that it is. I verified this by taking the heatsink and fan off again and physically removing the CPU...AGAIN. I am prepared this time...I downloaded the AMD Processor Recognition PDF and printed it out. The little black label on my CPU has the following info on it:

AMD Athlon
AXDA2600KV3D

along with some other info on it...the guide says...

The AXDA part means AMD Athlon XP
The 2600 part means 2600+
The K is the package type
The V is the Operating Voltage...1.40 V in this case
The 3 is the Level 2 Cache Size and is 256 KB in this case
The D is the Maximum System-Bus Speed....333 MHz in this case

I started the machine back up and pressed Del to boot into the BIOS and went into the SoftMenu III settings. I went to the CPU Operating Speed and changed that to 2600+ (333) and then pressed F10 to save and exit. It booted back up and registered the right CPU on POST...but now it won't stay up and running because it is apparently getting too hot....which would suggest the problem lies in my heatsink/cooling fan.

Taurus

yes, this post leads me to believe you're having cooling problems.

what kind of heatsink are you using? and are you using some kind of themal compound between it and the cpu?

gballard

the CPU cooler is a ThermalTake Volcano 9 CoolMod cooler and I am using Arctic Silver as the thermal compound.

gballard

I found some videos on AMD's website about installing the CPU and heatsink and so forth and in the videos they suggested using thermal pads instead of thermal compound. I am having a hell of a time finding a place online that sells thermal pads tho...anyone know of any place?

Erbmaster

Stick with the compound mate!.
Pads on the whole are inefficcient.
You need to ensure that the layer of compound between CPU core and Heatsink is not too thick.
Too think will have the same effect as having none at all.
Arctic Silver also needs a few days to "bed down" although this doesn't seem to be the problem in your case.
You have a spare suitably rated HSF at hand?? lol
I think cooling too, (or bad BIOS settings lol) but you seem to have those sewn up.

Thinking........

---

gballard

why does AMD itself recommend the thermal pads then?

Taurus

because they're much more fool-proof than liquid-based compounds. using pads would cut down on the number of people complaining their temps are too high because they don't know how to properly apply thermal compound.

you said that your temps were in the mid-50's and rising when the processor was running at 1500+ speeds. so something's definitely wrong with your cooling.

update the bios also.

gballard

okie doke...will advise the results for those interested