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Topic: Albatron K8x800 Pro II and Cool'n'Quiet (Read 1437 times) previous topic - next topic
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Albatron K8x800 Pro II and Cool'n'Quiet

Just thought I would share this info, since I've spent a very long time looking for it and it doesn't show up in this form anywhere on the web.

Cool'n'Quiet can be made to work on the "Albatron K8x800 Pro II" mainboard if only your first memory slot is populated.

When I migrated my PC to a new case, I made sure to install every PCI card card in the same slot as before. For convenience reasons, I moved my one RAM stick to the third slot (the retention clips on the first memory slot are blocked if you install a AGP graphic's card). Upon booting, my PC allways crashed at the Windows login screen. I've been through reinstalling drivers, reinstalling Windows and all would work well, except Cool'n'Quiet would allways result in a crash at boot.

I stumbled upon this piece of information by accident in a review for the "AOpen AK86-L" mainboard. This is a quote from AOpen:
Quote
Basically the cpu memory controller supports 4 banks . a.k.a 2 slots - the AK86 has 3. This means you must have an external clockgen for the 3rd dimm slot. Since C&Q was not announced by AMD at the time of the design of AK86 our R&D decided to have one slot controlled by the cpu and 2 by the external generator. Since the external generator can not be controlled by C&Q, C&Q can only work when only the first dimm slot is populated. Officially boards with 3 dimm slots can not be validated by AMD as C&Q compliant.

It is likely this applies to the Albatron as well. I moved the ram stick back to the first slot and installed the v3.04 PowerNow driver from AMD (ignoring their warning, that it wouldn't work on my system, which makes sense in the context mentioned above, since the Albatron also has 3 dimm slots). Voila! Now the idle CPU temperature is 6 degrees (°C) lower than before.

I assume the PC will crash, if a memory module is present in the second slot, but I haven't tested that.

[span style='font-size:8pt;line-height:100%']Hope this is my final edit...[/span]