AGP/overclock woes...

[Candyman]

Howdy folks. Just got my 2500+ last night, and was somewhat shocked when I booted it at 200 FSB and the boot screen was overlayed with all sorts of pretty-colored letters, numbers, and smiley faces. It then proceeded to begin loading Windows, and the random stuff went away. It seemed stable, but I was kind of freaked out, so I rebooted again, only to get the pretty colors once more, and a freeze when detecting my hard drives. In other words, I don't think my GeForce likes running that far out of spec. Unfortunately, this means I had to back down my FSB overclock even though my processor was fine (stock voltage, too).

Is there any workaround for this issue short of backing down the FSB? I'm on a KT333 board, so unless there's a softmod for AGP lock, that's not really an option. I tried setting the vid card to stock timings and upping the VAGP to 1.8, to no avail. Is it dangerous to see the pretty colors at bootup? I'm tempted to keep the FSB that high, but I wouldn't want to let the magic smoke out of my box.

[AMD Inside]

Assuming your KT333 board supports a 166MHz FSB, at 200MHz your PCI/AGP speeds are...

PCI = 40
AGP = 80

I would say that those are too high out of spec. Generally most video cards are OK up to 75, but that's about it. Maybe it's time to look into nforce2 .

[Stratus Fear]

That sounds like ram to me. I had the same problems until I slacked the RAM timing slightly and boosted the vdimm when I was going over 200.