Hi, I own a Matsonic MS8137C motherboard (Rev 1.0) and I wanted to upgrade my CPU from my (good) old Duron 850 to an more powerful one. After checking the www.matsonic.com site (http://www.matsonic.com.tw/eng/productsdata/ms8137c.htm), I found that my board supports CPUs up to Athlon XP 2600+ and I have chosen an Athlon 2400 XP (FSB266). The problem is that my computer does not start anymore. I can only think that the mother board does not support this cpu or the processor itself is broken (I'll test this tomorrow on another mboard). I'm sure I have done everything right and I'm very frustrated that I spend this money for nothing... Note that I don't use DDRs, only DRAMs at 133MHz (2x128MB). If anybody has experience with this mainboard (MS8137C V1.0), please tell me, I'd really apreciate it! All the best, florin

You may need to flash your BIOS to support that CPU. Flashing the BIOS is not for the faint of heart. A mistake will render your computer unusable. That said I would recommend that you boot to the CMOS and set all settings and timings to default and see if you can boot. If BIOS is holding you back I beleive the machine should boot and recognise the chip as a slower model. If this doesn't happen, try reseaing everything. If your settings in CMOS allow for setting CPU speed manually, try underclocking. Also run memory at lower settings.

Just to add to the point above, manually setting your mobo to 100mhz is always a good idea when building a machine or changing cpus. Makes life easier on everything. Your duron needed less power from the power supply and only ran at 100mhz fsb, so as you upgrade here you are all at once increasing the psu load and increasing the mobo speed. That said, my guess is that your bios is pre-xp cpu, which includes new instructions versus the original athlon and the duron. Usually if your mobo has an old bios it will just underclock the cpu, but in this case it may be inoperative because the bios does not understand the instruction set of the cpu. So you'll need to put the duron back in and flash the bios to be current, then reset the bios, then put in the new cpu

Hi, Thanks for all the advice. Actually I have updated the BIOS to the latest found on matsonic site. I did this after the new configuration didn't work, so I put the old CPU back and installed the latest BIOS. On their homesiete there was no indication that this update will make my mb support newer processors. After the update, I have put the new CPU but I observed the same behaviour. The only thing that I didn't do was the resetting of the BIOS after installing it. Could this be a problem? My motherboard does not support any CMOS setting regarding the CPU speed, I can work only with a jumper that sets the FSB speed. I also tried to see if the 2400XP works at 100 FSB but it didn't. florin

Yes you always should reset bios when installing a new cpu. Looks to me like the 8137C is the kt266 and the 8137C+ is the kt266A, and they each have their own bios. So its possible that the web page you posted that says you are good for cpus up to the 2600+, may be true for the 8137c+ only.

I was aware that there is another model (MS8137C+) but I have contacted the manufacturer (matsonic) today and they confirmed that my ms8137C supports this processor. Could it be possible that my mobo is 'blocked' or even defective for FSB266? florin

If you set the mobo to run at 100mhz and it still didn't work, I don't know what it could be. The power supply is a possibility, but running at 100mhz doesn't draw much power.