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Yo GrammatonCleric, great info. Though you may want to check the link to SilentPCReview. Your post is the first that actually makes sense of what is going on with the clock multiplier and these mobile chips. Awesome. And for those interested the specific part in the article about PowerNOW! is available on page 3. The article looks fairly good, but is rather long: http://www.silentpcreview.com/article300-page3.html I already swapped out my mobile sempron from the DFI board, and now I wish I hadn't. I will definitely put the chip back in at the first chance I get, install the PowerNOW! software and post the results. Q: However, doesn't the board need to support PowerNOW (ie similar to motherboard support of Cool'n'quiet)? I guess there is one way to find out... Incidentally, why would one disable Cool'n'Quiet when overclocking? My limited impression is Cool'n'Quiet would be even more useful when overclocking. Note: I have done this without any problems (just bumping up the clock speed not changing the multiplier).

Just to be clear. I am not trashing this motherboard by any means. For the price I can put up with more than few a problems here and there. Overall, I like the board, and I'll say it again. That being said if there are other budget boards out there that compare favorably to the DFI K8M800 series, I think myself and others would like to here how the DFI stacks ups. I'm sure DFI would as well. I may gripe that the BIOS is over a year old and doesn't support all the socket 754 processors out there. I may gripe that the SATA implementation doesn't appear to be the greatest. In fact, I'll throw in a new gripe - has anyone else noticed that the audio headers are right under the first PCI slot? So you either use the headers and lose a PCI slot, or you don' use the header and keep the slot. But every board has its own shortcomings. On the other hand, one thing about that this board I like is that I've found that it actually over and underclocks reasonably well, at least compared to my other board.

dsg, Sounds eerily similar to the problem I experienced a weekend ago, and commented on in another thread. I had two drives: one SATA and one IDE drive in the same box. I tried booting from first the SATA drive, and then the IDE drive. In both instances the boot sequence hung right after POST, at the very beginning of the boot loader. This suggests an incompatibility with the board's BIOS and the manner in which the boot loader "discovers" bootable hard drives at boot (probably one of the first things a boot loader does). But really I'm only grasping at straws. Note: when I disabled/disconnected either drive, I was able to boot just fine with the remaning drive. One thing I thought of trying but never got around to was: trying a different boot loader (LILO for instance would have been my first choice). Sounds like the Windows XP boot loader hasn't fared much better, so maybe there is something only a hardware change will fix. PS. If there is any DFI BIOS guru reading this post that can explain the boot sequence in detail, I'm all ears.

Out of curiousity, I swapped the DFI motherboard back into my HTPC setup last weekend. To make a long story short: On Saturday I swapped the DFI K8M800-MLVF in and swapped the Biostar K8M800-M7A out. On Sunday I swapped everything back. ;P ============= The board swapped out fairly easily and every periperal (Kept graphics card, HDTV tuner, Cable TV tuner, HDs. etc in the HTPC box unchanged.), pretty much just worked with the DFI and the drivers I had unchanged. The swap took about an hour of just phycally removing components and putting them back in, and backup my system. The rest of the weekend was spent troubleshooting my SATA drive and my boot loader. I have two Drives in the HTPC: 160GB Maxtor IDE drive for VIDEO 40GB Seagate SATA drive for the system files I could never get the DFI board to boot properly whenever I had the SATA drive connected. Everything works fine without it. I'm fairly certain it is a problem particular with my boot loader (GRUB) and DFI's SATA implementation. But rather than switch bootloaders, or put in an IDE drive to replace the Sata drive... I just swapped everything back. A word of caution to those using GRUB and the K8M800-MLVF and multiple hard drives, be advised. ===================== PS. "dsg" 1.2TB --- dude, can I just say you freaking rock! good luck with the RAID. My experience with this board and SATA has left me rather disappointed thus far, but I wish you better luck.

Just out of curiosity what are people using there K8M800 boxes for? I picked the this board for an HTPC setup. I liked the fact that is was Micro-ATX but had a lot of onboard features. Useful since MicroATX's have fewer upgrade slots. For instance, I needed firewire and I didn't want to use up a slot for it. For HTPC, don't use overclocking much, but did test out a setup where I had a Sempron 3100+ overclocked to 2.0Ghz. In fact, an HTPC setup tends to shoot for low power/quiet setups. Features that are desirable include: Cool'n'Quiet support, S3 suspend(STR), RTC, Wake-on-Lan(WOL), and mobile sempron support. I tend to think of the box more as an appliance and less like a PC - I want it to be quiet, always on, and low power. Unfortunately, the board had its trouble with STR, and a few months ago I switched out the board for a Biostar with a Mobile Sempron 2600+. The Biostar also uses the VIA K8M800 chipset, but lacks Firewire. It also has a newer and better BIOS and supports the mobile sempron chips. Mainly, though it worked with STR right out of the box. However, just recently, I loaded up the latest version of Ubuntu, and got STR working on the DFI board. I was pleasantly surprised. Now am considering switching back to this board! Very good board for HTPC setups for those interested now that STR works. But still could use an updated BIOS support newer CPUs. PS. I'll post some specifics and photos if interested.

Thanks for your efforts. I'm a newcomer to this forum and I appreciate the reply. So here's what I've learned so far: 1) the K8M800-MLVF does not have the support code for the mobile sempron 2600+ (or most likely any mobile processor). 2) without the support code the BIOS does not recognize the CPU and the motherboard defaults the clock multiplier to 4X 3) 4X multiplier at the default 200Mhz clock pegs the CPU as a paltry 800Mhz. 4) the K8M800-MLVF does not have a manual Clock Multiplier setting to counteract the above. Either the correct CPU code or the manual multiplier would be necessary to get the right Mhz for mobile CPUs. Not even talking about overclocking here, just getting the right clock speed in the first place. As far as upgrading the CPU or motherboard...of course that's always an option and a good one too. But why do you think I bought a budget motherboard in the first place?

Hate to rehash this beauty of a thread. So I opened up a new one - "Mobile Sempron 2600+ Sonora". The problem is very similar, both mobile processors, both experiencing greatly reduced 800Mhz CPU clocks. With my setup the processor is recognized at boot as a "Mobile Sempron 2600+". Great right? Anyone know how it can be that the BIOS recognizes the processor, but that it uses the wrong clock multiplier? Please direct future replies to the new thread! Thanks. PS. "Happy_Games", might I ask you about manually setting the Clock Multiplier? The "Genie" settings of the bios appear to be well hidden in my version of the firmware - 3/15/2005. Can tell me about the firmware version you are using, and which mobile processor you tried?

I have a question regarding the K8M800-MLVF and mobile AMD processors. Specifically with the Mobile Sempron 2600+ (sonora). Q: Is there a way to set the CPU clock multiplier with this chip and board? If so do tell. And if anyone has this specific combo working I'd be very interested in knowing more. On the DFI board, the 2600+ processor is stuck at a 4X multiplier. Or 800Mhz. It should be at 8X multiplier and 1600Mhz. Things I tried: 1) Removed the XP AMD 64 Driver (Cool'n'Quiet). 2) Reflashed the latest BIOS, dated 3/15/2005 on the DFI website. 3) Loaded Optimized Settings 4) Loaded Fail-safe Settings Having looked around the Internet, the problem seems most likely to be the motherboard Clock Multiplier. Looked high and low for a jumper, bios setting, software settings to change this, and am ready to accept that it just plain doesn't exist... On a side note: has anyone gotten STR (aka suspend-to-ram, S3 suspend) working with this board on any version of Linux? Or any type of WOL (Wake on Lan)? And if not, anyone know of another micro-atx board that can do all of the above? :-) ============= DFI K8M800-MLVF AMD Mobile Sempron 2600+ (sonora) BIOS 3-15-2006 1x 256MB DDR400 1x 128MB DDR400 IDE 1 - MAST - EMPTY IDE 1 - SLAV - EMPTY IDE 2 - MAST - Sony CD/RW Optical Drive IDE 2 - SLAV - Kingwin HD tray - 20GB Seagate