I currently have an the ECS k7s5a, 768 mb Pc-2100, and a volcano 9 cooling my 1700. I want to try to squeeze some extra juice out of this puppy. Does anyone have an old board that would help me out?

Quote: Originally Posted by wolfareno I currently have an the ECS k7s5a, 768 mb Pc-2100, and a volcano 9 cooling my 1700. I want to try to squeeze some extra juice out of this puppy. Does anyone have an old board that would help me out?

I picked up a refurbished board at NewEgg for a friends budget rig. Grabbed the ASUS A7V333-X for 40$ it had basic OC options.
You get like a 15day return if it has problems..one has been going for 5 months now... no problems.

The N-Force 2 based boards go for 50$ and up..They run out of stock quick on the good ones like ABIT NF-7 or ASUS A7NX, so look on a Mon or Tuesday.

They have some other boards in the 20-35$ range too, but didnt look at them too close, I doubt that many would OC any better than what you have now.

Hope this helps if you can't find one here

You may want to invest in some better ram before you start attempting to OC. If you on a tight budget then I wouldn't recommend OCing. It can cause some serious damage if not properly cooled and your warranty would be voided.

Quote: Originally Posted by Crazy_J You may want to invest in some better ram before you start attempting to OC. If you on a tight budget then I wouldn't recommend OCing. It can cause some serious damage if not properly cooled and your warranty would be voided.

Agreed..but ya have to get your feet wet..I was able to get my "Starter" Palimino XP2100 up an extra 100MHZ or so from the stock 1733MHZ with some AS-3 and the stock HSF.
The voltage to the the CPU could not be raised on the ASUS A7S-333 motherboard I had, so I was stuck..temps were not much of an issue with stock voltage.

That is when I showed up at the PimpRig Forums ..Looking for a way to volt mod that board..

Was immediately shown that it would be a waste of time and why.. But they also showed me what I needed to pass up my buddies rig..
I bought the ABIT NF7-S and swapped some parts for a XP2400 T-Bred one of my gaming buddies had just upgraded to, but had not been able to get it past 2.2GHZ... his old XP2100 T-Bred was happily running 2.3GHZ on water before...so he went back to it... LOL

The XP2400 he swapped to me ended up runing over 2370MHZ on air with a 470+FSB...He just bought a 2500+ Barton a few months ago..and this Overclocking Mentor of mine is still stuck at 2.3GHZ


That same old Palimino XP2100 from my "Noob" rig was donated to a friend in need...we built a nice new MSI N-Force 2 based rig with some new parts and some "Stock" left overs parts...
His old rig was a Duron 800 and PC133 memory


Anyways..this other $SOLID$ buddy of mine loaned it to me a for a few weeks last year when my rig was down...
He isn't into any Overclocking, just gaming, so I 'Tested" it at 2GHZ and ran Folding on it at all night with a stock "Barton" style HSF and AS-3...temps were in the high 50's (C) not that unusual for the old "Palimino" cores.


A decent Overclocking board is the best place to start..upgrades like memory and better cooling are easier and more noticable if you start with that basic building block, upgrades will do little good on a board that won't OC at all.

Oh..and the old generic PC2700 from my 1st rig ended up running at PC3200 speeds on the new Abit NF-7 with extra memory voltage that wasn't even adjustable on the old board.

Take a look HERE and see if they have something in your budget

You can get a refurb An35N at newegg for about $40.

d00d is it the K7S5A pro Ver. 5.0? It should be purple, I had one and I loved it until I killed it with a flathead screwdriver removing my old Volcrappo 6 Cu, after having the board for like 3 weeks

AN35 Ultra is your best bet, it's cheaper than the NF7-S and it's BLOOOO

Quote: Originally Posted by j-dogg d00d is it the K7S5A pro Ver. 5.0? It should be purple, I had one and I loved it until I killed it with a flathead screwdriver removing my old Volcrappo 6 Cu, after having the board for like 3 weeks AN35 Ultra is your best bet, it's cheaper than the NF7-S and it's BLOOOO

Naw its the non-pro ver 3.1... just flashed the BIOS

thanks for the advice guys... ill do some shopping...

Solid and I have both topped 500 FSB on Shuttle boards...

I found a Soyo SY-K7V DRAGON plus! that a friend of mine has lying around that he is gonna trade me for.... It is supposed to have multiplier, voltage, and FSB controls. Will this be good for "gettin my feet wet"?

Quote: Originally Posted by wolfareno I found a Soyo SY-K7V DRAGON plus! that a friend of mine has lying around that he is gonna trade me for.... It is supposed to have multiplier, voltage, and FSB controls. Will this be good for "gettin my feet wet"?

It's a decent board, Never been fond of Soyo though. It may have trouble reaching 400FSB depending on wich Via chipset was used.

This is not a terrible thing..anything over 333FSB is going to give you pretty good performance compared to the 266FSB you are used too.

It will give you something to tinker with.. learn how to tweek the Bios (Voltage, Memory Timings etc)
If you decide you want to go farther later on, you will have the basics down when you are ready for an N-Force2 based motherboard

You are NOT going to be able to reach 200fsb...that chipset maxes out at 185fsb if you're lucky. If you run this speed, then you're going to be running your PCI, AGP and memory frequency out of spec which could lead to damage.

As for the board itself, sure, it'd be a good one to just tinker around with.