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Long time away, back to noob status: unlock an AMD?


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Hey all, long time no post! :P

 

My boss's computer is running extremely slow. He uses Adobe CS4 on a daily basis and come to find out, he is using a whopping 512Mb of RAM, 80GB IDE HD (2GB free space), and a Sempron 3400+!! I couldnt believe it even opened illustrator lol.

 

Anywho, I went and purchased some minor upgrades such as a matched pair of 2GB DDR2 PC2-5300 RAM (4Gb total) and 2 WD 320GB drives to be set up in RAID 0. I will also be overclocking the 3400 but here's my problem.

 

I am running an Asus M2NBP-VM CSM board and in the BIOS, I have no voltage or multiplier control except for 9x and lower. There is an option in the BIOS to adjust CPU functions but the enable/disable part is blacked out. Is there a way to unlock this board or am I stuck with basic overclock settings?

 

Thanks in advance!

Newport

Edited by Newport

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hey, welcome back;

 

do you have the motherboard manual?

 

have you tried pressing the page up and page down keys or the + or - keys with whatever setting you wish to change highlighted?

 

had the worst time trying to get this sort of thing figured out on a motherboard not so long ago for a cpu voltage setting increase, and it turned out to be page up and page down or something simple in order to get it to work from what seemed like a locked setting.

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Wow... been a while... so... how IS Hunter? :lol:

 

It sounds like you've tricket out a Geo Metro if you haven't upgraded the CPU... a Sempron 3400 is going to suck at CS4... rather than OC a work computer, I'd say push the boat out and get an X2 CPU, more cache, two cores, it will be immensely faster at CS4, especially for features and plugins that support multi-core (SMP)

 

e.g X2 5400 AM2 (2.8 GHz dual core) for $65

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16819103289

 

with twice as much L2 cache per core (512KB vs 256KB) and 800 MHz faster clock speed (2.8 GHz vs 2.0 GHz), I'd estimate the performance to be about 3 times as fast (or more) as a Sempron 3400 in SMP-aware apps, about 1.5 times as fast (or more) in single-threaded apps, and the entire OS will run better...

 

performance comparison at THG:

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/cpu-cha...p;prod[1314]=on

 

notice the price:performance is a lot higher too

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