Upgrading PC & setting up BIOS & stuff questions

[big_treacle]

I recently upgraded my pc quite a lot. A lot lot actually. New motherboard, processor, memory, , gfx card, Hard Disk & stuck MS windows XP pro on. I plugged it all together, ran the setups, installed the drivers etc. It seemed to be fairly fine & ran everything nice and fast as expected. It boots up pretty fast and so it was only yesterday that I suddenly noticed that the processor was being detected running at 1.2Ghz which is way too slow. So I dived into the BIOS & changed the processor multiplier etc to whack it up over 2Ghz (it's an Athlon 2600 - I haven't looked into exactly the clockspeed to set it to yet, but 2Ghz is OK for now...) which seemed to speed the thing up quite a bit. Anyway, this started me looking around at memory frequencies, AGP bandwidths and stuff and I'm not convinced any of the settings are getting the maximum out of my system. Or maybe they are... I'm not really sure.
So I guess I'm gonna have to search the net for documentation on all the BIOS settings for each component, new BIOS upgrades, new drivers etc etc.
Question is, for those who have already done this sort of thing, is there a good FAQ/guide to this sort of thing somewhere? How did you go about it? I'm not really interested in completely overclocking everything, i just want the maximum stable settings that all the components are designed to be at (for now).
Cheers in advance.
Stew

[pdV6]

Can't really post too much advice on particular settings, as it would depend on the specifics of yoiur m/b & components.

BTW an Athlon 2600 actually runs at 2.2GHz iirc

Plenty of BIOS FAQs around on the net. Try Googling for "BIOS" + the chipset of your m/b

[annodomini2]

The Athlon XP 2600 should clock at 2133Mhz standard. You can play around with the speed settings in the memory, but you can de-stabalise your system (XP will crash in other words)

You'll see very little improvement over automatic setup, other than ensuring your ram is running at the correct clock frequency.

[big_treacle]

The strange thing is there are 2 settings for memory frequency in the BIOS. automatic sets the frequency to 100Mhz which seems a bit low. the other setting, i forget what it is, DS or some such abbreviation, puts it at 200Mhz (this is the default setting). Pretty weird.