Fair advice - quick point - I didn't say there is anything wrong with the
Zalman flower - its excellent, I like the PC to be as quiet as I can get it
because I work with it all day long in an otherwise silent room and the
constant humm has been driving me mad. I have changed for a quiet Nexus PSU,
binned the graphics heatsink and fan for a zalman thing. I can run the
Zalman CPU cooler with minimum fan speeds as I have undervolted my XP CPU to
just over 1.5v and modified the case for easy air-flow, but I thought a
mobile might allow me to overclock and still stay cool (and quiet)
Well my point about instability was that, given same
heatsink fan, you still have same noise level. Try reducing
the fan to the target noise level and see how high the
current cpu can run and stay stable... then you have a
better idea of what benefit there is to the Mobile chip...
maybe you've done so already but we don't know this.
Basically, it doesn't sound like this board will handle a mobile. It can't
take Bartons and it only has the first 4 bits of the multiplier adjustment.
There is a bridge you can burn on the mobile to add the "+8"
multiplier, so it would start at 14X. IF you tried a barton
that's what I'd suggest you do, since 14X @ max stable FSB
the board can do, is still within the o'c margin for a
mobile chip, plus being modded to be in the > 12.5X multi
range your board can set other > 12.5X multi if it has multi
adjustment at all, which I assume it does.
The FSB can be adjusted up to 250MHz, but the AGP and PCI cards can't be
locked to 33, so the PC is not much good above about 150-160FSB! The chip I
have now is unlocked, so I can pinmod it to get higher multipliers and clock
speeds, but obviously it gets hotter and needs more fans = more noise =
unhappy me!!
Yep, it probably should run much higher than 140-something,
IIRC that's about where USB or NIC starts crapping out on
many boards.
I have 2GB of DDR333 RAM, so I don't want to change that = costly!
Now I see the situation better, but do you have assurance
that this 2GB of memory would be stable at DDR333 bus speed?
I know it's spec'd for it but depending on the quality of
the memory it might not be so stable... perhaps a
try-it-and-see situation, at least better odds than PC2100
memory.
Is there a cheap newer board you would recommend? And where could I buy a
mobile athlon?
I always fine it hard to recommend cheap boards, they always
seem to have little issues, which don't effect some users
but for others are a major problem. Even so, nForce2 boards
have dropped quite a bit in price over the past year, there
should be several good candidates under $80, depending on
the form-factor (ATX vs mATX) and features needed.
Abit NF7 is a solid choice but lacks SATA, as go many
lower-priced boards. Right now Newegg has a great 1-day
deal on a Gigabyte board but it too has fewer features than
many,
http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproductdesc.asp?description=13-128-257&DEPA=0
and I have no experience with that particular board, am
mentioning it primary due to price and timeliness of the
sale.
Also consider that your current board supports old 3.3V AGP
cards, but (almost all) newer boards don't, only 1.5V cards.
Maybe not an issue but worth mentioning.
For cheapest board having integral SATA you'd probably want
a Via KT600 based board, which would be a few percent, maybe
4%, slower than nForce2, and does not lock AGP/PCI busses
either.
If I were to buy a new socket A board today I'd probalby get
something like an NF7-S2G (or the Gigabyte linked above but
I don't know about it's overclocking features), since it has
a solid foundation, good o'c support, SATA and GbE. Then
again I've been quite happy with an Asus A7N8X-Dlx board
with an o'c Barton in it, but today I'd choose a board with
12V-CPU-power (4 pin connector), SATA & Gigabit LAN.
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=13-127-184&depa=0
, and 2.5ghz, on a Abit NF7-S 2.0.