AMD CPU's and an ASUS Board.


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I got an AMD Athlon XP 2600+ on an ASUS A7N8X-X.

And it will/would run at 1250Mhz... Anything above that, and it doesn't want to know, I just get BSOD's. (BSOD's trying to run Windows or even install Windows :x :angry:)

I just rung up the place I bought it and they said that the FSB should be 166Mhz and the Multiplier 12.5x but it still only runs at 1250Mhz...

I've flashed the BIOS to the latest version.

Could anyone point me in the right direction, coz I don't really wanna send it back !!!

Thanks,

Ferret !

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Yes...

I've just figured something though, I originally bought a DDR266 stick of RAM just to get the machine up and running...

266 / 2 = 133

133 x 12.5 (Multiplier) = 1.6Ghz.

But when I had that DDR266 stick, it would still only run at 1.2Ghz.

100 x 12.5 = 1250Mhz (1.2Ghz)

That seems to suggest that since I got the board, it was ALWAYS running at a 100Mhz FSB.

I've set the FSB in the BIOS to 100Mhz, 133Mhz, 166Mhz and 200Mhz.

Even played with the jumper on the board it's self, but to no avail.

But whats getting me, is even with the original DDR266 and my current DDR400, why won't the FSB lift above 100Mhz ?!?

Is it really damaged, there can't be anything thing else, i've read the manual from front to back and theres only ONE jumper for the FSB/CPU and that didn't do jack**** !

Thanks,

Ferret !

There is a solution but I don't have time this morn to go step by step.

The problem you are having is due to automatic configuration done by the Asus BIOS. I don't agree with the amount of control that certain vague settings give the BIOS as far as setting timings and stuff, I have fourd that even when it seems that basically you are defining the settings the BIOS can sometimes still override you.

I recommend playing with the BIOS until it seems you have EVERYTHING defined manually.

If you can't figure out good settings I'll check back later and help ya out a bit.

G

I've tried both RAM sticks, resetting the BIOS... Just about everything I could think to do...

Garrett Socling: I've set EVERYTHING (To the best extent I could) in Advanced Chipset Features to Manual settings -- And guess what, 1.2Ghz, supprise supprise.

So that walkthrough would be greatly appreciated please mate !!!

Thanks alot mate,

Ferret !

I did that mate - Upda\ted with the latest BIOS, but that didnr't work...

ANYWAY, goooooooooooood news, after trying to set ALL the options to manual, then that didn't work, I set them back to AUTO and guess what..

I got a working AMD Athlon XP2600+ :D:D:D:D

Why this has done the trick I don't know, But i'm never gonna enter the BIOS again incase it goes again.

Thanks for all your help,

Ferret !

i know mate.. i read through the thread, and i'm sure you're very computer literate, but I still think something was set wrong somewhere because things don't just not work and then all of a sudden start working.

but hey thats just my opinion :) again, glad its working!

That sounds very typical compared to what I have experienced with this BIOS.

A setting that would not work one try would work at a different date.

As far as setting stuff to manual and it not working, I'd say 95% of the settings I tried didn't work. Even dumb things like lowering the multipler from 10.5 to 10.0 as the inital step of overclocking prevented posting.

Then, when I tried to raise the FSB, if I did it in too great of steps it wouldn't post. I had to do it in like 3Mhz increments to reach 155. Then, it wouldn't go above that for a while. Now it is at 160Mhz/160Mhz...Wierd.

Finally, I think the board has issues with memory. I have Crucial PC2700 (2x256). Some relaxed settings would not post.

If you under-clock the memory, the board automatically increases the aggressiveness of the memory settings, even in full-auto mode. Hence, when I set the board to full auto, and it gave me 133/166, and I changed it to 133/133, it would not post (lowering the CL didn't go over well with the memory?). After bringing the mem and FSB in synch, I had to raise the FSB high enough to raise the CL to get the board to post. Then, it was fine and dandy.

Very very complicated. If the board is going to make assumptions as to what is optimal, it should at least do a basic quick-test/post routine to find out what 'optimal' settings are valid. I dunno...I just didn't like the 'I know what is good for you' attitude of the board, especially when its know-it-all configs wouldn't post...

I think I am going to reboot and go for 166/166...all this talkin about it has me interested.

I'll get a pic of my current BIOS settings while I am there...

G

I apologize for the poor pictures...I wasn't planning on taking so many and wasn't really planning ahead...

BIOS Default -

biosdefault.jpg

This is what I have been running at as my default setup. It is stable and has decent performance. Basically, the initial bootup settings overclocked from 133Mhz to 160Mhz. This is what I stepped up 3Mhz at a time when I was overclocking. It would not accept jumps of more than 3 or 5Mhz at a time, but if I went slow it went up without a problem. At 166Mhz, the system is not 100% stable, and I believe the problem is my ancient Palamino. Shame I can't drop the multiplier...

Full Auto -

fullauto.jpg

This is completely what the BIOS chooses when it first boots up, except for choosing 133Mhz over the initial bootup of 100Mhz. Note the incorrect CL settings (considering that it is running the memory at 166Mhz, this stick of Crucial ram is not rated for 2 at 166, and the Active Precharge Delay set to 6. Not that the BIOS says its is gonna run the memory at 166Mhz...all you see is the vague 'auto'...What happens if you aren't really BIOS tweaking inclined and you can't install Win XP because when set to full auto the mobo pushes your memory to the point it isn't stable? Memory Timings, notice, are set to Optimal.

Auto SPD -

autospd.jpg

This is what happens when you change the BIOS default from 'Mem Freq - Auto' to 'Mem Freq - By SPD'. Basically, when you enable SPD the mobo realizes that it was running the memory too agressively and backs the CL off to 2.5 and the Active Precharge Delay to 7. Memory Timings are still set at Optimal...the previous settings weren't so Optimal after all...

Auto Agressive -

autoagressive.jpg

This is simply 133Mhz with all of the auto-config settings set to agressive. Please note that I set Mem Freq to 100% to take that oddness out of the loop... All it shows on the surface are 'across-the-board' agressive memory timings, but it claims to also increase 'System Performance' - whatever that really is, it isn't obvious from the BIOS. I wasn't blown away with the increased performance when changing this to Agressive, but it does have a marginal effect. Probably decreases stabilty a hair too. Memory Timings set at Agressive have some of the same effects as changing the Memory Frequency from 'Auto' to 'By SPD'...Why is this so complicated?

Auto Optimal/Agressive -

autooptaggro.jpg

With this schitzophrenic setup, the end result is basically what you get at 'Full Auto' - of course, I have Mem Freq set to 100%, so who knows what you'd get with Mem Freq set to 'Auto' or 'By SPD'...though I bet that Auto and 100% are exactly the same thing - as far as memory timings go. It still recognizes that the memory is 166Mhz, and runs it accordingly when set to Auto. If this doesn't seem excessively obtuse to you yet, I hear they don't have a solid theory on gravity and probably could use your help...

Auto 166Mhz -

auto166.jpg

With this setup, which is simply full Auto and Optimal with the CPU memory forced at 166Mhz, everything starts making sense again :

Even though the BIOS doesn't recognize the memory as 166Mhz memory under all circumstances when it comes to Memory Timings, and yet will run it at 166Mhz when set to Auto, it obviously is doing some sort of guess-work as to how to run the memory when set to Auto. Notice here that even though Auto results at 166Mhz when the CPU freq is set at 133Mhz or 166Mhz, with the CPU overclocked the Memory Timings are relaxed...

To wit : There is a lot more going on here than is at first obvious.

1750 -

1750.jpg

She booted and ran for a few hours at 166Mhz, but Hot CPU Tester revealed that the CPU was not 100% stable. A short while later the computer spontaneously rebooted (but did not generate a BSOD error). When she did that I reduced the FSB/CPU to 160Mhz, set the System Performance and Memory Timings to Agressive, and have been running on that since. Hot CPU Tester says these settings are stable...Unfortunately I forgot to get a new pic of these settings...which are not represented above...doh...

Ok. Thats it. Draw your own conclusions, but I say the BIOS is poor. I don't like it very much, I don't like the way it acts, or reacts to changes, I don't like the way it is hiding all of the important decisions it is making, I just don't like it. It shouldn't be so hard. Oh...and this doesn't even include the fact that I can't lower my multiplier...

Please note that I did not actually try to boot any of the above settings except for the first and last. I know that most of them won't boot, because the first day I got this board I spent about two hours trying all sorts of combinations to find something that simply worked...much less work well...

I have been threatening to write a review of this board...if I do, I'll be sure to get SiSoft Sandra CPU & Memory, 3DMark 2001, 3DMark 2003 and AquaMark3 results for all of the combinations that I manage to get to boot...of course I'll probably never get around to it...I'll have to review the board, compile test results, include the above text on the BIOS...take more and better pics...oofa...

G

Correction : Changing the settings from Optimal to Aggressive made a signifigant difference in performance.

Now, my 1600+ is running like an 2000+ :

Aquamark3 - 16810

3DMark01 - 10924

3DMark03 - 1565

SiSoft CPU - 6284/2528

SiSoft Mem - 2400/2244

I decided to benchmark the system since it was stable and I didn't feel like changing the BIOS settings back...

I'll try to pin down exactly what increased the performance (I suspect the vague 'System Performance ;)) and quantify the improvement...

G

Setting system performance to aggressive bumps your vcore .05v. It won't show it in the advanced chipset features but you will notice it in asus probe or mbm5. I suspect if you check the model #'s on your crucial ram that you'll find they are from the batch that were having compatibility problems with the A7N8X but I could be wrong since you have an -x board and the problems were with rev 1.x versions.

I don't think there's any way to access lower multi's without doing an L3 bridge mod and I think AMD made that pretty difficult with the 1600+ by perforating the space between the cut.

Anyway, good luck and thanks for the interesting read.

Thanks for the heads up on the compatibility issues...I suspected that there were issues (I thought I remembered reading something about it a while ago). I don't know why I didn't before, but I googled for a7n8x crucial problem and got a pile of results to read throug, so I can check it out. As far as the L3 mod, I had thought that the A7N8X automatically unlocked them, but if it doesn't...well, that explains that problem! Hafta break out the old pencil...

I think that this Palamino is a good overclocker, but I have no frame of reference. I guess some people are used to massive overclocks, but with my K7S5A all I ever had was like a 50Mhz overclock, so anything seems good to me in comparision ;)

Again, thanks for the info!

G

Garrett Socling - Thats one hell of a read...

I notice you said you got your CPU from 1600+ to 2000+ - All I can say is thats wicked, but I ain't touching bugger all after that experience of mine...

I personally wouldn't recommend this board to anyone, it's nice, but the BIOS is crap !!!

You know that 'Uber' BIOS I was on about, it's actually working alot better than the Offical BIOS, so I may have an attempt to overclock and see what happens ;)

Thanks again,

Ferret !

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SPC for NAS (TOS 7) is basically the same principle as UAC in Windows; it blocks executables from being launched by non-Super Users. After reaching out to my contact about these issues, I received the following response: Anyway, this only became clear when I closed the OpenClaw app screen and clicked on the OpenClaw icon in the taskbar; that is when I saw the message about disabling SPC. I think, due to the fact that this is a requirement, this should be a prompt during the installation process, not when closing the App Market and then trying to launch OpenClaw. There's also no 'Getting started' guide for people like me who have never used OpenClaw. I tried to add an LLM and discovered the tutorial led nowhere. That's when I started looking around the official TerraMaster forums, and I found a guide that helpfully explains that you won't get anywhere with OpenClaw unless you have a paid plan, which is disappointing because I imagined there would be an option to use a local LLM as I do in SubtitleEdit with Whisper-XXL. In addition, with the marketing imagery on the official site, it says that the OpenClaw feature is "all processed 100% locally for absolute privacy." which led me to believe that I could install a local LLM, not one that required paid tokens. In any case, TerraMaster does not provide guidance for this new feature, which was also a selling point of the F4-425 Pro! My contact also provided clarification about the above points I raised with TerraMaster Since it is not in the scope of the review to add paid services, I'll leave that to the people who are more qualified with OpenClaw. F4-425 Pro Surveillance App TOS also comes with a Surveillance app, which is not installed by default; it can be found in the App Market recommended section. In addition, after installing, it doesn't drop a shortcut on the Desktop or top taskbar, but you can "Send to Desktop" from the App Market listing for the app for a quick way to open it. Adding my Reolink POE doorbell camera was painless. TerraMaster doesn't appear to have a repository of preconfigured cameras; instead, the camera must be added using ONVIF or RTSP. No mobile Surveillance app TerraMaster still doesn't have a dedicated Surveillance app, although from searching online, Surveillance can be used and managed through the TNAS mobile app. I tried this with the updated TNAS mobile app beta in combination with TOS 7 and got a message that Surveillance was "Only accessible through web browser," so I reckon this must be limited to the stable versions of TOS 6 and the mobile app. More quirks In addition, whenever I minimized the Live View window in the browser Surveillance app, the feed appeared to switch to the Low-bandwidth stream, and there was no way to get the High-quality stream back. To get the High-quality stream back, I had to close Live View and then reopen it. Benchmarking A pretty cool feature of the TOS 7 is that it allows you to install directly to the NVMe M.2 SSD. In order to do that, you would have to leave out any HDDs during initialization, and even then, the system partitions are always written to two HDDs when they are eventually added. With three NVMe slots, this also gives an interesting scenario where you could build a TRAID storage Pool for installing all your apps and Docker on, and keep the third for SSD cache on the HDD pool. Limitless options! SATA PCIe 3.0 X1 A CrystalDiskMark test on a mapped network drive from within a Windows 11 25H2 PC (image above) connected over a 5 GbE hub was well within acceptable ranges. Although the read result on SATA was a little less than with the F4-425 Plus, for some reason, while writes were generally better. SATA PCIe 3.0 X1 I also ran the NAS Performance tester, which tests the link speed performance. As you can see, it pretty much maxes out the 5GbE connection. Of course, you can also opt to bond the two 5 GbE connections for a bit more umph, but I didn't do that. TOS 7, which, as of testing, is still in Beta, comes with an App Center that has a bunch of handy programs you can install right off the bat, such as Emby, Plex, Docker, as well as in-house Backup and Surveillance solutions. As you can imagine, any media streaming services you would want to host off the F4-425 Pro will work great, thanks to the Intel Core N350 CPU and its 16 GB of DDR5 memory. Accessing from mobile is only possible if Security Isolation Mode is disabled, which can put your NAS at risk from external sources, so there was no way to access it from the TNAS Mobile app. It's also quiet. I had this sat next to my computer on my work desk for the past week, and I did wonder if the noise I was accustomed to with NAS devices would annoy me, but all I could hear was a soft whirring of the rear fan (which was a little annoying) when the disks were not actively copying or reading data. Conclusion So what have I learned? Unfortunately, this release raises a few important questions and concerns that I feel haven't been adequately addressed. What I didn't like Our variant shipped with TOS 7 beta, and it's advised not to use it in a production environment. I feel that's a bit limiting on an $800 device. The mobile app is also still in beta and does not support some of the first-party apps, like Surveillance, and it still has quite a few bugs. I am a bit confused about the OpenClaw marketing along with the F4-425 Pro. I feel like that if it's going to be a main selling point, then offer official guidance on how to get started with it. TerraMaster recommends enabling SPC, but then markets the NAS for use with OpenClaw, which requires disabling SPC to be able to use it, opening up genuine security concerns for the NAS; and that's before you get into the security concerns of OpenClaw itself. Of course, the above issues won't be a problem if you decide to install something else on it, or even go back to the stable TOS 6. I wish TerraMaster had just given TOS 7 as opt-in rather than shipping with it. TOS 7 has been available as a preview since December 2025 (so well before my last TerraMaster review), and according to a thread on Reddit where a user shared a screenshot from the TerraMaster Facebook page, it is scheduled to launch today, June 23, but there's nothing about that in the TerraMaster news blog. My contact confirmed over email that TOS 7 exits beta today. The rubber feet also deserve a mention as they continue to be a problem, with them coming unstuck the moment you shift the F4-425 Pro anywhere on your desk. What I liked What it comes down to, though, aside from what I already mentioned, you are still getting a quality, affordable device here, so recommending it will depend on the individual's use case. If you're just looking for a relatively small NAS device to manage virtual machines on, backup your files, and take care of your home theater streaming, then it is a great device that will certainly futureproof you for some time. It provides good performance, takes up little space, and is, on the whole, very quiet. Four bays afford proper redundancy using TRAID or RAID 5, and you can even expand on storage capacity by adding the 2-bay D5, or 4-bay D8 Hybrid DAS over a USB 3.2 (10Gbps) link. Considering the 2024 releases were more about power, with the likes of an Intel Core i5-1235U high-end laptop CPU under the hood, I asked my contact last time if we could expect more of the same in higher-end models and was told: It makes a lot of sense to use Intel's N350 chip inside a NAS; it is more than capable of doing what the F4-425 Pro is intended for, media streaming and backup. The only downside is still the clear lack of community and even staff support on the official forums. In the past, I have had topics go unanswered for days, or there would be generic-type "we've noted this and passed it onto our developer team" type responses. Along with the other things I mentioned, it all ends up costing it a couple of points. If you are comfortable with the command line, Docker, and setting up TrueNAS or Unraid, you'll be fine. You can do great things with this hardware. In TOS, the apps are a bit lacking, and things don't always work as expected.\ AI NAS?! What has become clear to me this year is that we are going to start seeing all kinds of "AI NAS" come to market, and while that might be good for us consumers, be diligent and research these claims. Although the F4-425 Pro technically comes with AI, it is really using a cloud service that is externally sourced off-device through the third party OpenClaw app. My colleague did review a newcomer to the NAS space earlier this year, and it includes a local AI assistant inside the Zettlab D4 NAS, and they do not even use AI in the product name, check out Chris' review here. Where to buy and a discount coupon However, it does not change the fact that this is truly a great entry-level home media-class NAS that you can buy right now. TerraMaster is having a 20% off launch discount, plus you can also still apply our unique 10% off coupon on checkout, which only works on the official website. So here is a breakdown of the pricing that is only valid on the official TerraMaster website. TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N350) + 20% discount + 10% coupon = $575.99 TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N305) + 20% discount + 10% coupon = $503.99 TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N350) + 20% discount + 10% coupon = £525.59 TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N305) + 20% discount + 10% coupon = £460.79 Use NEOWIN coupon code during checkout for 10% discount Over on Amazon US and UK, the F4-425 Pro also gets a 20% launch discount, but here, the above 10% coupon cannot be applied. TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N350) for $639.99 at Amazon US (was $799.99) TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N305) for $559.99 at Amazon US (was $699.99) TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N350) for £583.99 at Amazon UK (was £729.99) TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N305) for £511.99 at Amazon UK (was £639.99) As an Amazon Associate, when you purchase through links on our site, we earn from qualifying purchases.
    • well you can add a GPU for around $500, that's still around the price of Steam Machine but overall significantly better in performance.
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