hi, i'm running athlon xp 2000 with a dfi am33-el motherboard. It would report the cpu as athlon xp 1250. I check if it was install right and it was. then i updated my bios and the bios were set to 133, but still reporting at 1250. I've check if the cpu was running hot, it was running at 37 C. Could it be that i'm running 250 watt power supply? if so, how much power to i need.

I would reccomend running at least a 300watt power supply, is the motherboard a old motherboard, i have seen a AMD Athlon 1.4ghz in a old Abit motherboard, and it wont run it at 133mhz even with a, 300 watt psu the fastest chip ive seen run in it is a AMD 1ghz so could be a problem with the motherboard being old or that your ram isnt fast enough make sure you have got pc133 (sdram) or PC2100 Ram for (ddr ram). But i most certainly would put a 300watt or a 350watt power supply in first, even though that may not be the cause, the system would probably have problems running if you sorted the other problem. The Powersupply would be my first concern to upgrade. Hope this helps you if you have a old motherboard the board may need a bios update.

the motherboard is old, but on the company website it said it supports up to amd athlon xp 2200 with the latest bios. i updated my bios with the latest and my rams are pc133. I have no idea what might be causing the problem, but i read around here that it might be the power supply.

I would say its the powersupply, make sure you get a decent one as the cheaper ones may go funny and give too much voltage out and damage the rest of the computer. Im running a 300watt psu with a cd burner and a dvd rom drive and a Maxtor Diamondmax 9 with a 92mm case fan and a old Pentium 333 cpu cooler on my graphics card until i get a replacement and the system is fine. But i would try the Powersupply, also have you got a heatsink fan that can cope with the heat it needs to remove from the XP2000.

your psu may or may not be enough to get the cpu running at 1.67g, but that cannot be the reason you are at 1.25g. My guess is that the 133 number you found in bios was for the dram. A 2000+ that is running at 1250 is running at an fsb of 100. Your mobo may have a jumper you need to set at 133 instead of 100, or there may be another place in bios where you set the fsb to 133.

Thanks for joining in johnoh as you have opened up more posibilites to the problem. But i thought a 250watt PSU would have struggled to run the XP2000, depending on how many optical drives are connected, would you think a 250watt PSU would cope with a XP2000 with a optical drive and a hard drive?

i read the manuel and there is a jumper to set it to 133 mhz, but how do i set the jumper?