asus K8V SE Deluxe,Please Help

In article <41855eb6.0@entanet>, "Neil Catling" <neil DeleteThis @ncatling.co.uk> wrote:

 > I've got a asus K8V SE Deluxe with a athlon 64 3400, could someone please
 > tell me why the computer is only running at 2400 and how to change the speed
 > safely.
 > Thanks in advance

AMD uses what is called a "P.R." rating for the processors.
2400 is the number of actual megahertz (the CPU core clock)
3500+ is what AMD feels an equivalent P4 would have to run
at to match the performance of your processor. So, the 3500+
is the "performance rating".

The "performance rating" is a shell game, in that the Athlon
is compared to the Pentium4, but a Sempron is compared to
a Celeron4. This inflates the Sempron's performance, and
makes it tough to figure out what you are getting - given the
price of the Sempron (for socket 462 at least), stay away
from them.

You can see on this page, how a 3400+ and a 3700+ differ
only in the cache on the die, and they have the same
processor clock. The extra "300 MHz" worth of Pentium
performance, AMD feels, comes from the extra cache.
But in terms of clock rate, if both those processors
execute code that stays within the L1 cache, they will
complete their benchmark in exactly the same time. The
Performance Rating, of necessity, has to include
benchmarking things that have a significant memory bandwidth
component, and that is how they differentiate the 3400+
and the 3700+. (I.e. You would feel a difference in
Photoshop.)

<a style='text-decoration: underline;' href="http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInformation/0,,30_118_9485_9487%5E10248,00.html" target="_blank">http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInformation/0,,30_118_9485_...7%5E102</a>

You can also see how the 4000+ for socket 939, gains
its advantage from having a dual channel memory interface.
Apparently that is worth another 300 points in the performance
rating. This is why, if you have a specific program you use
all the time, it pays to find out how that program takes
advantage or not, of memory bandwidth. Your 3400+ already
has the 2.4GHz execution speed, so the other processors only
pay off slightly, when there are more cache misses.

HTH,
Paul<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->