KT3 Ultra 2R + Barton 3000+

Question

Hi all..
Hope someone can help.
I have a KT3 Ultra 2R board with the following stats:
Athlon XP (Barton) 3000+ FSB 166 CPU
CoolerMaster HHC-001 heatpipe H/sink with 80mm fan
Antec 520W PSU
2 x 100 ATA Maxtor Viper 80Gb HDD's with 8Mb cache each in striped RAID array
Asus TI 4600 Ultra 128Mb V/card
Audigy S/card
Lite-on CD/RW
Lite-on CD/DVD
2 x 512Mb Corsair XMS 3000 DDR Ram (333 and above) with aluminium heat spreaders
Lian-Li PC70 Tower case with 6 x 80mm fans
Rounded cables throughout
Win XP + SP1
The Problem:
This system worked fine with an Athlon XP 2200 CPU and I read MSI's CPU support list and saw the KT3 Ultra 2 6380E supported the Barton XP 3000+ CPU's so I bought one.  :P
At first I had trouble booting on the 5.7 version bios, with the lock ups throught the bootup process. I reset the bois to the defaults and slowly worked up the settings using the recommendations in the forums.
At the moment, the system will boot up with fast command set to normal, no agressive DDR timings, 1T command disabled, fastwrite disabled, agp read/write disabled and SDRAM set to SPD (HCLK).
My 3DMark01 & 3DMark03 scores are lower than when I had the XP 2200 CPU installed and the SiSoft sandra results are the equivalent of a Athlon 2000. MSI says the board supports the Barton 3000+, but at what cost ???  :O
The system is very unstable and and requires on average 3 boots to boot up successfully. The 3DMark03 test often locks up mid way.
Any help or the settings MSI or you used to achieve their results would be VERY helpful. Please Help... ;(

Answer 1

I have had a similar problem running my kt3 ultra2 (non raid) at 166 fsb. In mid april I bought a 2600+ 166 fsb athlon to upgrade my system from a 1.2 ghz athlon. I bought some new pc2700 crucial ram to go along with the processor. I had also recently bought a radeon 9700 pro in late march, and a 1.2 athlon would just be a waste of this great vid card. I had been running fine with the radeon and the 1.2 athlon with the msi 5.7 bios and 4.43 via 4-in-1's.
I battled this problem for weeks. I bought a new antec 550 watt PSU, corsair xms 3200 ram, and new antec tower case trying to find out if the problem was ram, power or heat. I should also note that turning on spread spectrum helped a little in stability. Setting it to .50% made it stable in windows and games, but the computer would not turn on if shutdown unless I cleared the cmos. No setting besides this had any effect on stability. Even conservative ram timings. I was about to buy an Asus a7n8x when I realized that I had once run my old cpu and ram at 166 fsb when I had the 5.6 bios a couple of months back. I did not keep it like that in fear of damaging the ram while overclocked.
So I reflashed to 5.6 which still supported the 2600+. That finally worked almost perfectly, although I still have to keep spread spectrum at .25% to be stable (which is odd, people say that is supposed to hurt stability). So in my situation, it was the bios that was faulty. I have had some very ramdom crashes to the desktop (3 of them) in games and one hardlock with a blank bluescreen in unreal2. This is over a span of a month. So it is not perfect. It might be the display drivers causing this, which I have recently upgraded, or I might need to back off my ram timings which are at 2-2-2-5 which this ram can handle easily at 166. 3dmark has yet to crash. Prime 95 passed when I ran it for 30 minutes. Im going to run prime 95 today and see if it will run for like 12 hours stable. Im still looking into getting a new nforce 2 mobo, however (abit or asus).
I hope this helps your situation, you should give it a try. Although, the 5.6 bios does not support the 3000+. It might still work, it will maybe just not show up as a 3000+ in the bios, but as a 2.17 Athlon XP.
I think MSI should be made aware of this possible 5.7 bios fsb instability. Why spread spectrum seems to be related in my situation, is really odd also.