I'm not sure exactly what has happened with your system, but I don't think
that a BIOS upgrade is the answer.  Your A7N8X Deluxe may not have supported
a 200MHz frontside bus without a BIOS update, if it was an early revision of
this board, but the Athlon XP 2700 only requires a 166MHz frontside bus,
anyway.  It does use a fairly high multiplier to reach its specified speed
(i.e., 13 x 166MHz  = 2.17GHz), but I don't think that would have been a
problem.  When the system boots up does it recognize that you have an Athlon
XP 2700 installed?

When you say that the processor is running at half it's expected speed, can
you go into the BIOS and see what the frontside bus speed it is using
actually is.  With some BIOS, if the system failed to boot properly on a
previous occassion, the next time you start up the system it will fall back
to a much lower failsafe mode of operating.  The idea is to allow you to
reboot the system, after the failed attempt, and get into the BIOS settings
to change something that isn't working for your system.  If your processor
is running in this failsafe mode, it probably is booting up with a 100MHz
frontside bus speed, which would give you a processor speed of 13 x 100 =
1.3GHz.

At this point, without knowing any more details, I tend to think that
something like this may have happened to your system.

As to why your hard drives are no longer recognized, I'm not sure what
happened.  But, this also seems to point to something going wrong with your
system, not that it needs a newer BIOS.  The hard drive could have failed or
the connection between them and the motherboard could have come lose, just
to mention a couple of first thoughts on why the drive is no longer
recognized.  (And when you say no longer recognized, do you mean that you
can't boot up into windows or that during the boot process the BIOS doesn't
recognize that you have an EIDE hard drive installed?)

John Sproule

----- Abbreviated Original Message -----
From: "Jeffrey Forman" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, September 05, 2004 10:09 AM
Subject: [PCBUILD] cmos problems?


> A few months ago I built a AMD2700 based computer running XP Pro.
Everything seemed to be running very smoothly until last week. First, I
found out that the processor was running at half the speed that it is
supposed to run at. Four days later the computer would not recognize my
primary 80 gig drive nor my data 160ATA drive. I have a Asus A7N8X Deluxe
mobo. Do I have to upgrade the bios?

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