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AMD Athlon XP 2000+ Review 6 Weeks Before Release

Mathew Solnik writes: "Tom's Hardware has a review of the AMD Athlon XP 2000+ 6 weeks prior to its official release. This review shows how to unlock the multiplier on the AthlonXP and how to reach AthlonXP 2000+ speeds easily." Note that by doing so, you are voiding any warranty you may have started with, risk blowing up your eyeballs, etc; do proceed with caution.

10 of 175 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Just what we need... by cnvogel · · Score: 2, Interesting

    > Is AMD trying to associate itself with a software
    > company out of Redmond?

    Well... not with the software company itself but when Microsoft spends huge amounts of $ to make everyone associate that "XP" with "modern, fast, up-to-date, stable, ..." they sure want to ride that wave...

  2. wow, the cluetrain really left you at the station by ebbv · · Score: 2, Interesting


    as has been stated on /. hundreds of times by now, the AthlonXP has nothing to do with windows XP. it was conceived totally separately, and is a coincidence, odd as that seems.

    they stand for different things, etc.

    try doing a little investigation before you just blurt out some random stupidity.
    ...dave

    --

    Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
  3. Very nice ... BUT by arminh1974 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Now all that is quite an achievement, that they figured out all what's involved, but let's face it: Overclocking an Athlon XP 1900 to 2000 won't do anyone any good. That's like 2% more performance and at what kind of expense and risk? What would be informative and what wasn't provided would be if an Athlon XP 1500 (1.33GHz) can be rigged to reach 2000+ (1.66GHz) that way. It's all about how much headroom the CPU-core has and the price/performance overclocking provides.
    Tom's article shows that the Athlon XP clearly doesn't have a lot of it. We can expect the Palomino core to stick around the 2000-rating (1.66GHz) for a while ... at least until they go 0.13micron.

  4. Re:Connect 2 contacts. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    The issue here is (for me), what is your time worth. It probably takes an hour to make this modification and you risk trashing the processor. With all that fancy modifying, you wind up with a few percentage points increase in benchmarks.

    Now, if you could take the very cheapest XP and achieve the same results, I might be interested....like the old celeron 300a that would clock right up to 450mhz by simply changing the bus speed from 66mhz to 100mhz. Those were the days. 8-)

    It is pretty interesting that the high end athlons spank the 2ghz P4 in most benchmarks and cost about 50% as much (and you get to use geek friendly DDR memory instead of paying through the nose for evil RDRAM).

  5. Re:Just what we need... by kraf · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Think Alpha AXP.
    AMD + XP = AXP.
    AMD has quite a few features from the Alpha processor, so I guess this is not too far-fetched.

  6. How much difference will this make? by Henry+V+.009 · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I took a look at the benchmarks that Tom provided. Is anyone really going to notice the performance difference of overclocking their 1900+ to 2000+?

    It's a few hours of work besides, and they run the risk of destroying a piece of expensive hardware to do it.

    This space for rent.

  7. Be very careful if you do decide to overclock. by Anton+Anatopopov · · Score: 5, Interesting
    If I could give one piece of advice from personal experience, the pink thermal pad supplied with certain heatsinks is not adequate for the job. If you intend to overclock your cpu, scrape off all the pink crap, and use some proper thermal compound like arctic silver. Spread it very thinly, too much and it will act as an insulator.

    Also, bear in mind that not only will your warrenty be void, but some people have said you may be liable to penalties under the DMCA, since the clock multiplier lock is considered a form of 'encryption' and the increased processor speed gained by unlocking it can be seen as 'copyrighted software'.

    Quite how this can be the case is beyond me, surely the speed at which I run my software is down to me, but you never know with these DMCA issues. It can all get a bit surreal at times.

  8. Re:Risky ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I make this simple for you. THG haked the motherboard that the AMD proccessor was sitting on. When a processor over heates the mother board shut off. By the way look at THG again and you see that the AMD proccessor fan was hooked stright in to the power supply, not in to the motherboard. So the motherboard could not recive information on the fan.

  9. Re:Inadequate testing by linzeal · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Well I for one and most people I know who frequent places like HardForum the forum sister site to HardOCP use burn in programs like SiSoft Sandra's burn in program for at least 12 or so hours before we leave the overclock in place.

  10. Re:Risky ... by Richard_Feynman · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I have had server with MoBo's without fan outputs. It always worries me to have the cooling system hooked directly into the power supply. So I aggree wholeheartedly that MoBo controlled cooling is the way to save your equipment.