Hey guys, I have an Athlon 3000+xp processor and i've noticed that when i start up my computer it says i only have a 1200mhz processor

Is there a reason why it displays this and is there a way to double check in linux?

Thanks all

That does seem low... I have a XP2600+ and mine says 1920Mhz

I'd check your BIOS and see what FSB and Multiplier you have and what it should be.

Just check your Mhz should be 2167Mhz 400Mhz FSB with a 5.5 Multiplier.

Hey, when i go into the bios and into the advanced chipset settings, i get a lot of configurable options. The ones i find that i think are important to change are the CPU external frequency (mhz), which gives the options 100, 133,160,200
the FSB spread spectrum which gives the options, disable, 0.50%, 1.00%, and the CPU frequency multiplyer which gives the options of 13.0, 13.5, 14.0, 6.5, 7.0/15.0, etc

Anymore help will be greatly appreciated

The Athlon XP has a 333 DDR front side bus which means its clocked at 166Mhz i.e DDR means it transmits at double the datarate of the supplied clock. The XP 3000 uses an internal clock rate of 2.16Ghz. The multiplier is fixed at 13 and 13 x 166Mhz = 2158M or 2.158Ghz.

Therefore make sure your FSB is set to 166, and your multiplier to 13, although you shouldn't be able to change the multiplier anyway.

One thing to bear in mind is that the BIOS does not identify CPU's by actual speed or BIOS speed settings. It actually interogates some CPU registers to get model and stepping codes which it then looks up in an internal table to get the product name to display i.e. "AMD Athlon XP 3000+" If your CPU is newer than you're bios then the CPU might not be recognised.

In the early days of MMX cpus, some models had certain optimisations that the bios needed to enable at bootup and if the CPU was not recognised then they wouldn't be. Write-combining on the old AMD K6's springs to mind. I don't think that there are any issues like that between XP models., so as long as the busspeed/multiplier settings are correct then I wouldn't worry about it.

p.s. leave the spread spectrum alone :-)

thanks guys, everything works