AMD Sempron(?)

[coius]

Well, after putting out a freecycle ad looking for an ATX Case, I got a guy who responded saying he has an older computer. Well, i went and picked it up and it has a Sempron 2500+ CPU in it. As well as dual CD-RW Burners, and a Half a gig of ram. And then the guy gave me MORE ram, this time it's 2x512MB DDR-400 Ram. SCORE!

it has a 32MB GeForce 2 Pro from what it looks like, but that's ok. It's going to be a lite-weight webbrowsing machine.

Right now, the thing doesn't see the CPU that is in it (It seems the Sempron as 1050Mhz(huh?) and so I am going to do a BIOS update (the first one it will have had) updating it from a BIOS in 2002, to one in 2005

Whatcha think?

Oh, and I got my Motherboard coming for my OTHER Athlon Socket-462 Project. This will be FUN!!!

 

[coius]

Well.. I *WILL* be updating the BIOS, as soon as I can find a good floppy... I have gone like 4 of them already...

 

[coius]

Well...shoot. I updated the BIOS, and instead of "Sempron", it changed to "Athlon XP". Well, looking at the Chip, it is NOT an Athlon. It says "Sempron 2500", but realizing now, this board is not designed for a Sempron about 2300+. Guys got any ideas? This is running the latest BIOS. Can anyone tell me how to figure out what the speed this thing is SUPPOSED to run at? I got it booting into Windows Installer with it at 1.45Ghz. I will see if I can overclock it higher than that

Oh, and when I pulled off the heatsink, all the compound had hardened are hard as a brick. I had to scrape it off and put some generic stuff. When I get the tube coming in the mail (Arctic Silver Compound #3) I will pull it off again and redo it. Right now, I am going to try to get Windows XP FLP loaded on it. Let's hope it all goes well!!!

(I would also like to note that this seems to be a troublesome Motherboard. It is noted all across forums that this particular board has problems from design. Hence, the reason they only made a "v1.0" board and not went through with it any more. It seems they made a major "Oops!" during the design. So far, no problems!!!"

 

[Franklinstein]

You do know that AMD chips don't often have frequencies that match their "xxxx+" numbers, right? The whole Athlon XP and 64/x2 line (including "low-end" chips like the Sempron and stuff) have been using a PR system, so the 2500+ represents the chip's performance relative to a Pentium 4 (or a Celeron, for the low-end AMD models) at that frequency.

For example, the Athlon XP 2500+ chip (supposedly) has performance equal to or slightly greater than a 2.5GHz Pentium 4, even though its actual clock frequency is only 1829MHz (11x166).

Also, many AMD chips with the same PR number have different frequencies. For example, the Athlon XP 2500+ lists its speed as 1829MHz (11x166), the Sempron 2500+ is listed as 1743MHz (10.5x166), and the Mobile Athlon is 1862MHz (14x133). It's about as clear as mud to the average consumer, but I think that's what they're going for.

Also, make sure to check your system bus speed, and check your BIOS to see if you can set the bus speed and/or CPU multiplier.

Sorry if this seems too obvious, but often some of the simplest junk gets overlooked.

 

[Unknown_K]

The athlon XP and its derivatives started at 133 FSB and ended up at 200 FSB, Xp1500+ to 3100+.

2500+ could be a number of chips

 

[coius]

Wow! thanks! I got done messing with the voltage/FSB frequency settings in the BIOS. I got it to report at 2500+ Sempron, as well as a 50Mhz boot! (1.8Ghz) though they are rated for between 1.7 - 1.75Ghz. So I am VERY happy.

This machine is going to a friend, sadly... the machine I am getting is only going to have a 2400+ processor (I think...) BUT it's going to have 512K of Cache, instead of 256k. I think I can live with that...

This will be uber-nice. My friend and I were thinking about building a 4-node beowulf cluster for the heck of it

(Pentium 4 2.8Ghz, AMD x2 64, Sempron 2500, and Athlon 2400)

Wanna guess the benchmarks? We would be using dual Gigabit cards on each

 

[coius]

I seem to been having stability problems with the system, but I switched out the RAM and it seems to have worked. Once I get the system fully up, I will make a BART PE Boot CD and test out the RAM on an isolated system

 

[Quadraman]

Later models of the Sempron had the 64 bit code of the Athlon 64 enabled, early versions did not. That may be why the BIOS is having a hard time trying to figure out which chip you have.

 

[coius]

Later models of the Sempron had the 64 bit code of the Athlon 64 enabled, early versions did not. That may be why the BIOS is having a hard time trying to figure out which chip you have.

I got it figured out. I just had to set the freq. manually in the BIOS. It reported as a Sempron 2500+ after I bumped the freq. up to 175Mhz. Now it's a 1.75Ghz Sempron 2500+