Back to the drawing board. Now I needed a new motherboard. I decided to check out the Newegg Refurbished area again and found a much better option this time. I bought an Asus A7N8X – E Deluxe. This board has features I’ll probably never use but it also has all the adjustability I was looking for. Besides Dual Channel Memory and Dual LAN connectors, it also utilizes an Nforce2 chipset instead of the Via Chipset of the previous board. I might mention at this point a caution for those of you that decide to follow my lead and purchase a refurbished motherboard. Be prepared to do some work after you get the board. Neither of the boards I bought came with manuals, installation disks or I/O shields. Downloading the manuals, drivers, and software is easy enough on a broadband connection but doing so on a dialup connection could test your patience! Once I had the new board in hand, I quickly realized my idea of comparing the stock thermal pad with AS5 was not going to happen. I removed the stock pad and used the AS5 to install the 2500+ on the new board. My previous experience with AS5 had been with a P4 installation and the AS5 instructions said to apply a small amount about the size of an uncooked grain of rice. The AMD processors with the small core require a different method and I suggest a review of the installation page for anyone using AS5.
It should be apparent that these hardware problems were not overcome in a matter of hours. It was a few days before I was ready to begin again and the anticipation had me pumped. The new board booted without any problems and the XP Home install came off without a hitch. I was already feeling relieved because I had chosen a refurbished board and had this gnawing feeling that it might have a problem. The AS5 installation
instructions recommended a cycle of powering down periodically during a 200 hour cure time for best thermal performance. This delayed the oc effort for a few more days while I diligently followed the instructions. I made a decision during this cure cycle that proved very beneficial. A somewhat new member of the PC Mechanic forums had shown a prowess for understanding how to achieve and maintain a high overclock using AMD processors. I had read many of his posts advising others and decided to send him a private message to gain a little of his personal guidance. I was smiling as I typed the first message, mostly because I have kids (and shoes) older than this guy! Not only was he cordial in his response but his interest in helping me was quickly apparent. It’s nice to know that a young fella in Detroit can teach an old timer like me on the other side of Michigan a few new tricks. If you want to know who he is, keep reading!
Two additional requirements for a successful oc project should be mentioned also. You need to measure the results of each change and you need to test the system stability after every change. Determining whether a change made an improvement can be measured using several programs. I chose PCMark 2004, SiSoft Sandra’s CPU Arithmetic and Memory Bandwidth modules, CPU-Z, PC Probe, the online test at PC Pitstop.com, Prime95 and Memtest86. Run the benchmark programs before you begin the oc and record the results in order to establish a beginning reference point.
