Posted By Jon on March 4, 2010

I don’t know how many of you this will help, as it deals with a fairly old motherboard, but hopefully it will be of use to some, and will save you from having to spend hours searching for a solution.

Here at YKO Studio, we’re not too concerned with being on the “bleeding edge” of technology, simply because it isn’t necessary for our needs. I’m running an old P4 3.0GHz Dell Dimension 8300 with 4G DDR (3.5G useable), and I recently upgraded Yoko to a 1.9GHZ AMD Athlon XP 2600+ Barton on an ASUS A7N8X motherboard with 2G DDR. We are both still using Microsoft Windows XP Professional, and probably won’t change that until we are forced to do so, because it works just fine.

After Yoko’s upgrade, I noticed that the old saying “no upgrade goes unpunished” still rings true. The first thing I had to do was to perform an “in-place” upgrade reinstall of Windows, because the machine wouldn’t boot (froze with a BSOD). That went surprisingly smoothly, and in relatively little time, the machine was humming along… EXCEPT that the clock was running 10 seconds FAST for every minute that passed (10 minutes fast for each hour)!

After hours of scouring the web looking for a solution, and finding only more reports of others who had the same problem, and messing with registry settings for the W32TIME app with no luck, I finally found the answer. After reading through 11 pages of posts regarding this problem on www.nforcershq.com a user named “lumi” suggested the following -

Get into the BIOS configuration and make sure the following are set as noted -

System Performance: User Defined
CPU Interface: Optimal
Memory Frequency: 100%
Memory Timings: Optimal
FSB Spread Spectrum: Disabled

After making these changes, Yoko’s clock now holds perfect time. I should note here that all the time I was trying to fix this, the BIOS always held the correct time and when XP was rebooted, the clock would go back to correct time and then start to run fast again. Aparently, there is some incompatibility between Windows XP and the Aggressive CPU/RAM timing settings of the A7N8X motherboard (Nvidia NForce Chipset).

So there you have it. If you are experiencing this problem on an old Nvidia Nforce chipset motherboard, you should be able to fix in short order. Sure, you won’t be able to squeek every last ouce of speed out of your system, but to be quite honest, I didn’t notice a difference between the “Optimal” and “Aggressive” settings, so it is probably a very minimal improvement at best.

Jon
“The Right Guy To Call”

Category: The Right Guy To Call
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