Criteria for Athlon XP "Thoroughbred" Support

[Skeleton]

Hi,

I'm a little mystified as to why some relatively modern motherboards do not appear to support T-Bred core chips. For example, I have an Asus A7V133 revision 1.05 with a KT133A chipset and a DFI AD75 with a KT333. The latter does not support my 2400+ T-Bred yet the much older A7V133 with the KT133A chipset apparently does. Why on earth would the much newer board with a more modern chipset not support any T-Bred core CPU?

Cheers

 

[Scout]

That's not a problem with the hardware, it's just that the XP2400 wasn't out when that DFI board was designed, so the BIOS doesn't support it... and it looks like DFI hasn't updated the BIOS since 2002.

Asus on the other hand tends to be much better at offering BIOS revisions so their customers can use new processors.

Scout
700 Mflops in SETI!

 

[endyen]

Wow, that looks like a major cockup on the part of DFI. It looks like that board does not have access to the upper registers. It only supports multipliers to 12.5.

 

[Skeleton]

Well, I emailed DFI and it looks as though the board was designed before AMD released the specs concerning T-Bred compatibility. They said the PWM circuit on revision A of the board isn't compatible with the T-Bred chips and was only corrected before AB0. I assume PWM is Pulse Width Modulator? Mmmm electrical issues. This appears to be the only reason it can't POST, since 9/2002 was the latest BIOS even for the boards that do support T-Breds.

 

[Crashman]

I had to mod an MSI board to accept a tbred. Something to do with disabling a protection circuit.

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[Crashman]

yes, but the problem with the MSI board was that even though the VRM supported lower voltage, it didn't fall within the RANGE tolerated for the return signal, or something to that effect.

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[dfiad75]

Hi,

I have an old DFI AD75 and I put Athlon TBred 2400. Everything is working properly (operating systems, games ect.). Beside one thing" BIOS doesn't recognize processor and display: "Unknown processor type 2000MHz"