I just noticed last night when restarting Mandrake 9.2 that it flashed a "bus speed 33mhz" up on the screen. Is there an official way to check the actual bus speed I am getting? If so, and I am running at 33mhz bus (when it should be 400mhz), how do I change that. The mobo is set up correctly and reported as correct with Win2K installed. It's been ages since I had to boot so I guess I just never noticed

Thats pci bus not fsb or front side bus. The pci bus is usually 33 unless you have a pci-x or something, The thing you are seeing flash up has nothing to do with the Front side bus wich would be your 400Mhz.

How would I go about checking that just to be sure?

if your asking how you would check to see if you have a pci-x slot it owuld be a 64 bit pci slot. Mostly these are used on server motherboards.

Actually I am rather familiar with the hardware end. I was wondering if there was a console command that would give me an indication of what FSB speed and PCI bus speed I was running at?

Since both of these are determined by the chipset you are running I don't see how you are going to change it. I really don't know of a way to check it but somebody else may.

dmesg got me what I was looking for. How do you explain this?

Using local APIC timer interrupts.
calibrating APIC timer ...
..... CPU clock speed is 1994.3474 MHz.
..... host bus clock speed is 99.7172 MHz.
cpu: 0, clocks: 997172, slice: 498586
CPU0<T0:997168,T1:498576,D:6,S:498586,C:997172>

My bus speed is supposed to be 400mhz not 100. Where is it pulling that number from and why isn't it at 400?

I have no idea if this info is available in an easy way. Try looking in /proc and cat some files there.

edit:
Second thought: I think you have a problem. This is my syslog on an Athlon1GHz/266MHz bus:
kernel: calibrating APIC timer ...
kernel: ..... CPU clock speed is 1000.1266 MHz.
kernel: ..... host bus clock speed is 266.7003 MHz.
kernel: cpu: 0, clocks: 2667003, slice: 1333501

I been wondering the same thing. This is a answer I would like to see too.

Waiting . . . . . . . .

how much was your chaintech fx 5200 video card, I think they are no longer in newegg.com

I paid $70.00 for mine. It works OK. I can play tuxracer with it. I haven't tried anything like Quake or Doom though. I know the card makes my CPU run at 90% just to get data to it though when running Tuxracer. I guess if I got a really fast card I would have to up my CPU too. It has to know what to display too, and that comes from the CPU I guess.

I like my little rig. It's a lot better than the old 400MHz with 128MBs of ram and a Cyris video card. It was free though.

Later

Forgot about dmesg. That will tell you what your speeds are. Mine is running at 133mhz witch is correct for my MB. I am not sure why yours is being detected at 100Mhz. The only way I know to set it is to load the kernel source and check the compile. I usually recompile for my specific hardware anyway.

It uses the motherboards internal multiplier to reach your proper fsb. i don`t think you have anything to worry about

JK you may be right about it merely detecting the multiplier speed. I just remotely logged in to my girlfriends machine. She has a 400mhz bus also and it too is detected at 100. At least I hope its just seeing the multiplier speed, I would hate to be losing 300 mhz...

On an interesting note, out of the 5 pc's iI have installed Mandrake 9.2 on so far, her's is the only one that set up the correct UDMA level without me having to make any changes. Hers had a Western Digital drive all the others had a Maxtor....

zmaint, you are not losind 300 mhz. i gather you are using a 2 gig intel pentium 4 with a quad pumped bus, this is where you get 400 mhz from the host busses 100 mhz. also the motherboard would be using a multiplcation factor of 20 to give you your processor speed. these are all the numbers and figures that overclockers have to watch very carefully.you can tweek the multiplier but you really have to know what you are doing otherwise you can fry your cpu. you see as you increase the clock speed you also increase heat. your system looks as though it has been tuned to the standard for a 2 gig chip which is fine. i hope this helps to calm your fears a bit