CPU speed (how to tell)?

[littleberry]

I just put together the FRY's special for a Pentium 4 2.53ghz (Northwood) that FRY's bundled with the ECS L4VXA2 motherboard (it was $140 which I thought was a good price). The BIOS is not as indicated in the manual and it will not let me set the CPU Ratio, but only indicates a bus speed of 133 (won't run any other way).
I went ahead and installed WIN98SE just to see what gives
and now I want to know if there is any program out there that will correctly report the speed at which this Pentium 4 is ACTUALLY running. Every time I boot up, the bios
reports that "CPU has changed or CPU ratio changed error", and then I have to press F1 to continue (pressing DEL to go into the BIOS is worthless as I cannot change anything).
There is a jumper for bus speed ("auto" or "533"), but changing it made no difference. How about it - is there a quick benchmark so I can know if my CPU is running at a true 2.53 ghz with a front side bus of 533? Also, what is the difference between "front side bus" and "system bus"? Thnaks, Littleberry

 

[Scout]

CPU-Z will tell you what you're running at...

http://www.cpuid.com/cpuz.php

133 is the correct FSB speed for that chip and don't worry about setting the multiplier, because you can't change it on a P4.

I'm not familiar with that board, but it's not uncommon to not have overclocking capability in a budget board like ECS builds...

The message at bootup may be happening if you're not saving the BIOS settings when you exit. It should only give notice once that things have changed, then you should boot normally.

Scout
700 Mflops in SETI!

 

[littleberry]

Thanks, Scout, that did the trick. CPU_Z reports a multiplier of 19 and a core speed of 2.53. It shows a bus speed of 133 and a frontside speed of 533. I really don't understand the difference between bus speed and frontside
speed, but, it seems to be working ok and the temp is at around 33 C, so, I guess all is well. Your were right about
the BIOS error message going away after I "saved" the bios.
I really didn't have anything to change, so I just disabled
the lan (by whim, since I don't use it), and then that error message went away. Problem solved. Littleberry

 

[Crashman]

There is no such thing as a 533MHz bus. It's all marketing, the "533" bus runs at 133MHz clock, with Quad Data Rate providing 4x the data transfers. Since 4x133=533, they call it 533MHz (representing the data rate) even though it's on a 133MHz clock.

Your multiplier is locked, so as long as your bus speed is 133MHz, you're running the correct speed.

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