asrock 939Dual-sata2 BSOD problems

[Tmitch]

I originally ran this mobo with Opteron dual core 2200 cpu even though my bios (early) was for an AMD Athlon. I was able to OC it until about a year ago when I started to have occasional BSODs so, I backed it off and it has been working perfectly until now. All of a sudden it started crashing again, so I slowed it down some more (about 10x, or 2000). All was well until, I went to Asrock, downloaded a new bios to use the Opteron, and ordered a new Opteron 2400 cpu. Now, I can't OC it at all, and it won't boot into Window(XP) unless I disable the dual core. Asrock won't help.

[Mr.Scott]

First, always give all your system specs for help on hardware problems.
Now, I can make this pretty short and sweet for you, as I've had a couple of these boards already.
1) Test your PSU
2) Those boards are notorious for power regulation failure.
If it's not the PSU, it's probably the board.

[Tmitch]

I have discovered a few things since. The Opteron evidently doesn't let you overclock with the multiplier but by changing the frequency of the cpu. This works now that I understand it. Oddly enough, when I had the old bios (which really didn't support the Opteron, I was able to "supposedly" change the multiplier, but when I upgraded the bios to support the opteron, everything changed.

Now that I understand, everything is fine, EXCEPT I can't enable the dual cores (which is by default "enabled"). When I do, I get the BSOD when it tries to boot into Windows. I am pretty sure that I could enable the dual cores (since the default is "enabled" when it thought I had an Atholon with the 1.2 bios.

I am tempted to go back to the early bios (now running the latest 2.2, also tried the 1.4 which was the first to support the Opteron), but that can't be right.

[Mr.Scott]

Originally Posted by Tmitch

I have discovered a few things since. The Opteron evidently doesn't let you overclock with the multiplier but by changing the frequency of the cpu. This works now that I understand it. Oddly enough, when I had the old bios (which really didn't support the Opteron, I was able to "supposedly" change the multiplier, but when I upgraded the bios to support the opteron, everything changed.

Now that I understand, everything is fine, EXCEPT I can't enable the dual cores (which is by default "enabled"). When I do, I get the BSOD when it tries to boot into Windows. I am pretty sure that I could enable the dual cores (since the default is "enabled" when it thought I had an Atholon with the 1.2 bios.

I am tempted to go back to the early bios (now running the latest 2.2, also tried the 1.4 which was the first to support the Opteron), but that can't be right.

I have no idea what you're talking about. All Opterons are upward multi locked. They always have been. So the only way to overclock one is using the bus. Also, I'm not getting what you're saying about 'enabling' dual cores. As soon as you install it, it's dual core. There is no enabling necessary, unless you mean that windows doesn't show that both cores are enabled. You would change that in msconfig, not the bios though. There is nothing in that bios to turn on or off cores.