No official support from the chipset.

firage wrote:

No official support from the chipset.

Ah, that explains it. Is it possible to manually get it to 400mhz?

It's DDR memory, meaning they give you a memory clock speed 2x the FSB. So if you set the FSB to 200 MHz, the memory will run at 400MHz. But you'd better know your timings. I usually pick them up from within CPU-z. And that's even if your MB even supports FSB speeds over 166 MHz. My Socket A system does not, so I'm happy to run my DDR-400 memory at 333 MHz and call it a day. It'll be super-stable that way anyway.

For my part, my Athlon XP build looks like this:

CPU: AMD Athlon XP 3200+ "Barton" @2.3GHz
MEM: 2GB (1GBx2) DDR-400 @333MHz
MB: Abit KX7-333 (fully re-capped)
Video: ATI Radeon 9550xl 256MB AGP (a SHITTY card that runs about as well as a 7500 did).
Audio: Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 PCI

I got myself an ATI Radeon x700 256MB AGP card, but the system refuses to POST with the card in there currently. Phil thinks it's a lack of power on the 5V rail. It fails to POST even with 30A on that rail, so I might have to look into finding one with a 40A rail.

Justin1091 wrote:

firage wrote:

No official support from the chipset.

Ah, that explains it. Is it possible to manually get it to 400mhz?

With my Epox 8K3A+ I was able to overclock the FSB by quite a bit without any issues. Having used old Socket 7 Intel chipset motherboards at 83 MHz FSB without any issues (PCI bus ends up at 41 MHz) I was pretty fearless. I think I ended up at 209 (DDR 418) with that board (IIRC I ran it up to 215 MHz FSB, but my hard drive performance began to suffer so I backed down). I only upgraded to an Nforce board because the caps on the Epox got bulgy. I did have to upgrade the northbridge cooling - the factory heatsink was passive, and not very flat, so it made poor contact with the chip. The board had mounting holes, so I salvaged one from another board, filed it flat, and used AS3.

This was also possible because I had an Nvidia card - Radeon cards were known to not tolerate out of spec AGP frequency.

I just had a look at the manual and it states

Via KT333 chipset
FSB @ 200/266 KHz

Clock generator (wth is this?)
100/133 Mix

Now the BIOS settings:
Current host clock: 166mhz (of course)
Configure SDRAM timing by: User (or spd doesn't matter)
SDRAM Frequency: HLCK (manual says you can put this to HLCK+33 or HLCK+66, neither of those two options are available.) Anyone knows why?

Memory modules say C2 so I changes default 2.5T to 2T in bios.
Also put bank interleaved 4 way.

I suppose I can put the FSB to 200mhz and reduce CPU multiplier right? Then I can get the 400mhz also on the RAM. Probably not much of a difference, but just being curious.

Thanks for the replies so far.

Why do you want 200Mhz FSB? The 2600+ is fast enough for the V5.

The KT333, the KT400 and even the KT400A do NOT support the 200 FSB.
Ramp up to this value is high overclocking the chipset.
I think, there are also no further additional multipliers for the AGP and PCI @ 200Mhz speed, so the PCI would run @40 MHz and AGP @80MHz.

Finally, only the KT600 and KT880 from the VIA series support 200 FSB but without 1X and 2X AGP support.

If you want more speed, take the Athlon XP 3000+.
The XP3200+ (2.33GHz) is also possible, but relatively rare and expensive.

That explains everything then, thanks! I don't *want* 200 fsb or 400 ddr, I was just curious if everything was set up correctly (as in optimal).

I'm really glad with the system, performance is incredible compared to my previous P3 800 build!

besides you want your ram to run in sync with your fsb, Athlon XP preforms worse if ram is run async, it will be faster for instance to run ram at PC2100 than 3200 with a 266mhz chip