Need a bit of help. I was lucky enough to be able to find and buy a new OEM Athlon XP 2600+; on ordering I requested the older 266 FSB version. A package arrived with the said processor but on checking the AMD part number it identified the CPU as an Athlon XP2600+ 333 FSB Barton Model 10. Now here’s my question. The intended mother board has a combined FSB of 200 or 266 (yes it’s an old board), now I’m pretty sure that the processor will not work on the board, but the company concerned advised me that there technical team is pretty confident that it will work on my board. Not being that techie my basic understanding of processors suggests that the FSB of the board most match the processor FSB So will a Socket A processor with FSB of 333 work on a Socket A board that has a FSB of 200/266. Something tells me that it won’t and I should return it to them forth with. Any help would be appreciated. If the CPU will work what would the effects be? Thanks for listening
Hi, you should have no trouble running the 333MHz FSB Athlon XP on a motherboard that supports only 266MHz or 200MHz FSBs. However, the processor will run slower, since its clock speed is derived from the FSB.
Thanks for the advice. So my next question is how much slower would the processor be. Would the installed Athlon XP 2600+ 333 FSB Barton model 10 be significantly slower or equal to the Athlon XP 2600+ 266 FSB Thoroughbred Model 8 (which was the processor i was expecting to receive). So if the processor is running slower then it's design, can it be overclocked to recover the lost performance. Would some one be kind enough to post a link to any guides or forum entries. Haven't got the time to search as i'm writing this from work once again thanks
It's difficult to overclock back, which is why 333MHz motherboard existed in the first place. Multiplier is most likely to be locked, so you can gain back by increasing the multiplier.
Yeah, it's difficult to overclock it back to the original clock speed, unless its multiplier is not locked. Plus, overclocking the processor depends on the motherboard being able to support a higher FSB. But that's not what your motherboard supports, right?
