Ok, here's the story: recently, my neighbours PC has been having a lot of problems with crashing and not starting properly and eventually it came to the PC not starting at all, so it was figured the PSU had failed, which turned out to be correct. With the PSU replaced (some 550watt no name - better than the 400watt no name that had been Ok for a year though) there are still some issues. On first booting up, it booted fine, but showed up as a Duron 850Mhz instead of a Sempron 2800+. My mate said it's Ok usually as even though it's named wrong, we could easily set it at correct levels in the BIOS. This we tried, but it hasn't worked. Firstly, the Multiplier was showing as changable upto 13x, but after each Save of settings in the BIOS, the system would not boot, which required a BIOS reset. Eventually we just tried changing the FSB to it's correct level (166Mhz), which got it upto 1416Mhz, which for me neighbour, would still be fast enough. But the problem is it still didn't work - it would sometimes crash after 10 minutes and others times it would last over 5-6 hours with no problem and shut down Ok. The otehr problem is that on a 'cold boot' the system freezes just after the Windows XP logo dissappears, whereas on a reset, it boots fine, and after shutting down completely and restarting after a couple of minutes, it boots fine. My mates not keen on doing a BIOS update,but anyway, I'm suspecting it's more than that. I've tried lowering CPU clock to 1133Mhz, and memory to 133Mhz (from 166Mhz) and it still has the same problems, so I'm wondering whether either the motherboard, the CPU or the memory have been damaged by the old PSU failure? Another point I will add is that it crashed when my neighbour was attaching a file to an email while on the internet, so could it be a memory/HDD problem?

Anyone got any idea's? Ta if you do!!!!

I'll just add the component details:

Sempron 2800+ Socket A
MSI K7N2 Delta 2 LSR (Nforce 2)
512MB DDR RAM (333Mhz effective)
120GB Maxtor HDD IDE 133 (8mb cache).
FX 5200 128MB
Hauppage TV Card
Hardware 56Kb Modem
550Watt PSU (no idea of rail specs, but it should work anyway).

I think that's all of it

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So the multplier defaults to x8.5.

Where did you get the sempron 2800? Was it new? Retail box or oem?

There have been a few fakes turning up which are reconfigured Geode NX cpus. If you can, take a close up picture of it or scan it and post the image.

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MSI K7N2 Delta2 LSR|35w XP-M2400 11x214 1.62V|2x512MB OCZ EL 2 2 2 11 2.9V|9600XT|Seasonic 350w
Abit AN7|XP-M2800 10.5x227 1.62V|2x512MB Mushkin XP4000 2 3 2 11 3.2V|9600XT|Seasonic 550w
Asus A7V600|XP-M2600 6-11x202 1.6V|2x512 Crucial PC3200 2.5 3 3 9 2.7V|PCI 32MB gfx|Corsair 450w

Yeah - 8.5 Multi. Got it from a place called Aria in the UK over a year ago - was genuine though in a genuine retail box and did work for a long while at 2Ghz until it started crashing about 3 months back, then a mate who deals with PC's all the time did something and it briefly stopped the crashing (although CPU was underclcoked to 1.6Ghz after that) and then just a week ago the PSU finally failed after the crashing re-occurred. Underclocking the core is making no difference unfortunately too. As it's my neighbours PC, I'll be unable to get any piccies. Pretty certain the box had the official unbroken AMD seal on it when it was received, and bought stuff from the place before that has been Ok.

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If it's a retail box, then it's genuine. It sounds like the PSU wasn't up to the job and may have caused some damage to the board or cpu when it failed.

Any chance of testing the sempron in another board?

It may be worth trying a CMOS clear and seeing if you get the x12 multi back.
The multiplier is superlocked at x12. It can't be changed in the bios under normal circumstances.

What bios version is the board running?


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MSI K7N2 Delta2 LSR|35w XP-M2400 11x214 1.62V|2x512MB OCZ EL 2 2 2 11 2.9V|9600XT|Seasonic 350w
Abit AN7|XP-M2800 10.5x227 1.62V|2x512MB Mushkin XP4000 2 3 2 11 3.2V|9600XT|Seasonic 550w
Asus A7V600|XP-M2600 6-11x202 1.6V|2x512 Crucial PC3200 2.5 3 3 9 2.7V|PCI 32MB gfx|Corsair 450w

My mate tried clearing the CMOS a number of times but it didn't help at all. Superlocked thing is probably why the multi can't be changed tho... not sure of BIOS version, I'll try and check it out - bit difficult with it being my neighbours PC. I think it may come down to trying in a mates selection of Skt A machines, although he's reluctant to do that. I'm certainly thinking along the same lines that the old PSU messed things up...

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