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.
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. ... at least until they go 0.13micron.
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
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.
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.