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Paint Yourself An Athlon MP
SNIa asks: "How many people are checking the prices of AMD chips after seeing this?" and points out this article at HardwareZone.com about modifying Athlon XP processors to perform like MPs. No guarantees, except a voided warranty.
that they would have this capability, although disabled. I mean they just cripple the chip so that they can get more cash out of the MP versions, smart move unless you wan't another fiasco like the celeron/pentium II.
:)
The bottom line is that only a few hobbiests and nerds are going to go to this length to get it working, certainly not many businesses are going to accept this. So AMD makes it difficult enough so that you can't do it at the flick of a switch, but you can with a little guts (and silver paint). Seems like a win/win situation to me.
Also don't forget it may be easier just to use a couple of Durons to accomplish this task, dirt cheap too
He who defends everything, defends nothing. -- Fredrick The Great
While serving the purpose of locking the cpu for ordinary people, these small bridges on top of the cpus have attracted all the HW geeks which have unlocked, overclocked, underclocked (to get a quiter system)these cpus.
One of the biggest strength in the Athlon line (in my opinion) is that AMD have been able to sell locked cpus to 90% of the population but have made it possible for the last 10% to overclock these cpus. They have won both the normal consumers and the techfreaks in that respect.
.... ofcourse it also helps that their cpus are affordable and that there are plenty of them!
Thomas S. Iversen
For a while I thought it was like the Pentium III...
The article never got out of POST... It's a nice though that just because you fooled the motherboard into thinking the CPU's have MP support they really do. This article proves nothing to me. Not until I see some *nix (or NT I guess) boot up and utilize both CPU's I'll just assume it's wishful thinking. Like setting your 500MHz celeron to 3 GHz and watching it post for about 3 seconds right before the chip burns :p
Can anyone link to a better site? one that does actual so it working?
I have worked in AMD's R&D department for the last six years. I was pretty involved in development of the XP and MP series in particular. Let me make clear that modding XP chips to work as MPs is a bad idea and will most likely result in one or two cooked CPUs within a month.
Yes, we know about the trace. We put it there to differentiate between the XP chips which contained our hacks to make it play nice in multiprocessing systems (aka the Athlon MP), and the chips not containing those hacks (aka the Athlon XP). Think of it like this: converting your car to diesel would give a great increase in fuel mileage, but it cannot be achieved by simply adding a "DIESEL FUEL ONLY" decal by the gas tank.
I don't want to sound elitist and say "Leave the chip-mods to the pros", but sometimes chip mods have an amateurish feel to them. Please, don't wreck your systems. Leave the traces on the XP chips alone.
(posting anonymously to protect my job)
This could come in very useful when you're trying to MP-enable your chip.... or maybe you can unlock the multiplier and MP enable it at the same time? =) BWAHAHA.... Where else, but Tom's? =)
-Berj
Somehow I don't think so. It might not work right, it might crash, but burn? Umm, how exactly is that going to happen? As for protecting your job - perhaps posting in something other than your actual name? You didn't actually use your name for your account did you?
;)
Seriously, I'm not trying to flame but claims that it will burn in a month or so sound awfully thin. Your going to have to either explain it a little better or point to some evidence of this occuring somewhere. Guess we'll know "in a month or so" one way or the other huh? BTW - all those neato' hacks made it into the Duron but not the XP?!
One thing the article did NOT give and that I hope the next one will is BENCHMARKS. On the off chance that this guy isn't trolling benchmarks ought to tell us if both CPUs are actually being used by the OS and if those "hacks" are actually for real. Compare it to SMP Durons for instance - is it much faster? I'd also be interested in hearing more about what SMP MBs work best - I nearly bought the Tyan this weekend
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Look for defroster repair paint. It'll be in a tiny bottle and is copper colored. It's got copper in it and is used to (duh) repair the copper defrogger lines on windows. It will work fine for this but it's pretty thin so be careful it doesn't run. Sometimes masking is a good idea but be careful that the "paint" doesn't wick under the tape. Just maybe use a toothpick to dab on the paint - you don't need much on there as it's a logic connection not something carrying amperage. In the past #2 lead pencils have been used for a removable solution. However this is much trickier IMO and is somthing I'd only try for test purposes.
P.S. Yeah, there are actually places that sell conductive paint but they're usually not as common as an auto parts place. I'm not sure that RatShack actually carries this stuff but I guess it would be worth a shot...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
I have a dual Tyan m/b with two XP chips in it. It runs hot, but it's been calculating SETI@Home more or less 200% of the time since it was installed, about 3 months ago. No problems, and I think it would have found them by now :-)
:-)
Pretty soon it's going to be taken off SETI and put onto the real task, but I thought S@H would be a good reliability burn-in (not to mention adding 6-8 S@H units per day to my total
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!