Asus A7M 266 processor support

[Jeremy480]

I have the Asus A7m266 motherboard with DDR support. I got it right as it came out quite a while ago now. Anyways, I recently upgraded from an Athlon 850, to the Athlon XP 1500,(1.3ghz). The first time I did this, the machine worked great the first boot up, then when I went to restart, it locked up and never worked again after that. I believe the processor went poof on me. I wasn't sure if it was just a bad processor or possibly my fan not cooling enough like it should have. Well, now I have gotten it replaced, and here I am back at square 1. I have a new CPU fan that is more than capable of handling the Athlon XP 1500, and I have it running at 1ghz now no prob. My main question here is will I run into probs again when I tell my BIOS to run it at 1.3ghz like it should be? I checked Asus' web site and all it says for processor support is Athlon 1ghz+ The thing is that they recently had a BIOS upgrade for the Athlon XP processor, but since it doesn't specifically say up to 1.3ghz, am I gonna have probs? These are the specs of the board.
Asus A7m266 specs

[gxavier]

should have worked fine. for one thing, the xp is cooler than your old athlon 850. maybe your heatsink/fan was on kinda shakey? no thermal paste? could have been a number of things, but ill let the real hardcore mobo gurus help you out.

[Froghead]

Yep, with those AMD CPU's ya gotta put on some thermal paste and make sure the heatsink is on properly or they will go poof pronto. We've had a couple T-Birds get so hot they melted the fans on top of the heatsink! If it's still running now it should be fine to set it to correct speed. You could go into the CMOS setup and check the temperatures under Hardware Monitoring. I think 130-150F degrees is OK. Some will run cooler. Hotter can be unstable.

[Gameguru]

Another thing you need to check ASAP is your yoltage! Your MB may support that processor without the BIOS upgrade but since it may have problems identifying the XP processor, it may be setting the wrong default voltage. This could fry your CPU with extreme prejudice! Go into your bios and check that its at 1.75v and while your in there, check the cpu temp. Iwould guess that when you got your new cpu you reapplied some thermal grease to the heatsink. If you didn't yo are asking for trouble. If your heatsink originally came with the "patch", scrape it off and put a dab of thermal paste on it. Just by doing that you should see about a 5º drop in temp.

Like Froghead said, these CPUs run hotter and if you don't have a good contact with the heatsink, you could roast your processor in seconds. My XP1600+ ran at 122º at the default voltage and processor speed with a coolermaster heastsink with the tape. After I lapped the heatsink and went with arctic silver II thermal paste instead of the "patch", it dropped to 111º.

Something to think about....