Can't remember the right BIOS settings! Venting uselessly.

Man of Honour
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5 Dec 2003
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So...I stuck an SSD in my old PC. Quite a bother because of case and PSU issues (I had to remove the main 3.5" bays to fit the graphics card in and the PSU only has 3 SATA power connectors on 1 cable so I had little choice about where to put the SSD and couldn't get access to it because of the cabling for the fan controller and...you know how it goes). Then I had to take it out again and put it back in upside down because of the SATA connector issue.

So I was not all that pleased, but at least the job was done.

Power it back up and...BIOS reports all settings have gone and goes into BIOS setup. Eh?

And there's the problem. I've had that board running stably at 400MHz FSB since the day I bought it in 2008. First with a Core 2 Duo, then another Core 2 Duo and then the Core 2 Quad that's in there now and which has been completely stable at 3.2GHz (8x400) for years. It was never stable at 9x multi with any overclock, but the big 50% FSB overclock more than compensated for that.

Now I can't get it to even post at more than 320x8 FSB and I've forgotten what most of the settings in the Asus P5K/EPU BIOS are for. There must be something I set differently last time, but I have no idea what. Memory divider is set to keep it under the DDR2-800 it's rated at. DRAM settings tried at auto by SPD and manual with the specified timings. Voltages tried at auto and manually set at specified levels for CPU and RAM. 330 FSB and it constantly reboots at the BIOS. 370-400 and it won't even start loading the BIOS. Yet it ran completely stably for years at 400, even with Prime95 and Memtest used just to maximise load for testing.

I've forgotten some setting in that BIOS and I don't know what it is. So now Fallout 4 (the only reason I bought the SSD, really) will be worse, not better. I'm just venting - I don't expect anyone here to remember details of settings for a ~10 year old board.

The moral of the story is: If it ain't broke, don't fix it!

All that was bothering me was loading times in Fallout 4 and they weren't really all that bad. With a drop in CPU speed of almost a third, I doubt if Fallout 4 is going to be really playable now. Bah!
 
Well, that's that sorted out. I took a break, had a cup of tea and went through the BIOS settings refreshing my memory.

The key thing was to increase the northbridge voltage to 1.4V. It's rated to 1.75V on this board with stock cooling, so that's still well within spec. Set that and it's all good with 400MHz FSB. Will it blend? Yes. Yes it will. CPU (set to 1.25V) tops out at 49C with all 4 cores at 100% load, m/b thermosensor tops out at 38C (but I'm not sure where it is). Everything back to normal and I can get back to thinking how to make the new skyscraper in County Crossing much more accessible to dumb AI settlers than the current one and laboriously making each storey slightly less than claustrophobically low with the concrete sections in wasteland workshop (place upper floor piece, snap floor piece to it, remove upper floor piece - for some reason WW floor pieces won't snap to WW walls and upper floor pieces, which will, are much thicker).
 
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