I found the man page for setpci. I just don't get the numbers at the end of the commands.

put 'em on a post it note, and stick it to the cpu fan.

i have the same motherboard and cpu as you, and
those commands enable disconnect on halt or
something like that, that makes the cpu idle a bunch
cooler.

these pages explain more.

http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/lin...07.0/0004.html

http://cip.uni-trier.de/nofftz/linux...ing-HOWTO.html

You've never let me down, Whansard, so I grit my teeth and did it. Nothing has blown up so far... If it messes things up I have no idea how to reverse what I just did.
When this slows the CPU, does it also slow the hard drives, or is that something completely different?
I have ACPI turned off in BIOS because I really don't know much about it. Should I set up ACPI in the BIOS, or in Linux? Don't answer that- I'll try to figure it out myself later on. I've been meaning to study up on ACPI.

Thanks AGAIN.

Siri Amrit

thats only good till you reboot. i can't remember what
i've got set in the bios.
right now my cpu is reading 83.3F and the motherboard
is reading 86F. the room is 74.5F.
if your cpu temp doesn't drop down to around 10 F above
room temp, i would guess it's the acpi in the bios thing, or
in the kernel.
i wouldn't have just blatently told you to do it, if i didn't
have the same board and cpu.
i have several offboard drive controllers and with
that setting the promise is a lot slower. it drops down
to pio type speeds. i put my highpoint controller back
in, and it only slows down about 10% from that setting.
the on board ide is unaffected.

i have those setpci commands in my rc.local.


edit: i wrote 10F below room temp the first time.

If I was you I would get some ddr, because all the boards with the best chipset, Nforce and the best model, A7N8X only supports DDR. Plus mobos that support both wont take as much ddr in the future.

so let's say you had $50 worth of sdram, and you were
going to get a new motherboard and cpu. you could
get a $60 motherboard and a $60 cpu. you could stop
there. or you could buy a different motherboard, and
$50 of ddr. so which should you do, spend $50 on ddr
or spend $50 more on the cpu. the $50 more on the cpu
will be faster, but not a lot. you'll get more of a speed
boost from a new hard drive really, or if you're a gamer,
on the video card. so at what point do you see the
most bang for the buck from upgrading to faster ram?

it's easy if you're getting all new stuff, get ddr. it costs
about the same.
does ddr put off more heat than sdram? if so, more
heat, more fans. I don't know.

The higher clocked DDR, yes, they put out more heat. Such as PC2700 with timings 2-2-2-5. But since you've only got a 133 FSB, you could get by quite easily with PC2100. Try to get really good stuff (2-2-2-5, not the slower 2.5-3-3-6) to maximize the performance. You will see a slight difference, but really, unless you're benchmarking, playing games that hit the ram constantly, or encoding ogg files or video, you're not really going to actually SEE much difference from SDRAM to DDR. You could easily just wait until you buy your next chip, since it will probably be a much better processor (what with Prescott-core and Athlon 64's just around the corner), and there will be better RAM out then, so just stick with your SDRAM unless you do happen to do memory intensive tasks.

Whansard, you're right again! My CPU temp dropped from 101F to 91F, with my room temp around 77F.

Probably a waste of money, but I did get 512 MB Crucial DDR-2100. Haven't seen any change from the 512 of PC133 I had before. Also, upgraded from a Riva TNT2 to a GeForce4 MX440. For simple stuff I don't notice any change. But last night I downloaded NVIDIA drivers, Chromium, TuxRacer and... WOW!

The best thing about this computer is how really quiet it is. It's quieter than my old Cyrix 166! I highly recommend the Enermax CS-1018 case with an Antec power supply and 2-speed 80mm Zalman fans.

your power supply, case and room will cool a little too.

you'll also get a good performance increase by setting
memory interleave to 2 or better to 4 in the bios settings.
since linux caches the disk so well with your extra memory,
it's like making your disk cache a bunch faster too.it won't
be a difference you can feel, but if you benchmark, you'll
see the difference. i downloaded unixbench, so i could
see the difference that little changes made.

"i have those setpci commands in my rc.local."

OK, really dumb here. I've searched all over and can't find rc.local anywhere. Thought it might be in rc.boot but there's nothing in there. Can you please show me what your rc.local file looks like and where it is?

Thanks,
Siri Amrit

Also... is there some kind of program that would let me moniter the temps while up and running, instead of having to reboot to see the temps in the BIOS settings?

some distributions don't have it. it's just one of the
boot files.
in knoppix, they are in /etc/init.d
there is no rc.local. look for something appropriate, and
add the commands there.
you need lm_sensors and i2c installed. it's a little hard
but you can do some searches. and gkrellm

Thanks again; you're teaching me so much and I really appreciate it.

if you don't have the source code for the kernel you're
using installed, i don't think you'll be able to install
that stuff. it might be installed already though.

type sensors in the tereminal and see.

I did write the setpci commands into inetd but I'm going to skip the sensors. I accomplished so much with installing Knoppix and getting the video drivers (first time I ever worked with a tarball!) and configuring the firewall, getting K3b set up, installing some great games for my hubby...
It still ain't broke so I ain't gonna fix it anymore for now.

Thanks again,

Siri Amrit