Slashdot Mirror
Teach An Old Athlon New Tricks
budn3kkid writes "Seems like Upgradeware have a new gadget out for those overclockers looking to upgrade their age old Athlon mobo (KT133, KT266 etc.) with a spanking new AMD Barton CPU. Also, saw an article at ol' Tom's about it right here as well."
Its nice not to have to put a whole new rig together, but how useful is it? Eventually you're going to end up with a super-fast CPU that is dragged down by the rest of the rig.
Oh, c'mon. I don't want to physically mess with my cpu and all of the sudden I'm an immoral person?
Overclocking processors isn't that dangerous of a thing, btw. Unless you did something physically wrong while installing the thing, or the heatsink (which would cause the proc to burn even if you didn't overclock it), all you'll have is an unstable system, in which case you bring the speed down until you get your perfect heat and speed balance. Chances are many of these cpu's computer stores refused to take back were indeed bad, and they were using overclocking as an excuse to screw the customer.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
you can do most(all) the stuff the adaptor does for the price of few small bits of wire.
the newer, better (and the better older too) mobos have this functionality already built in. with tbred and over you don't need to do any mods to the cpu at all to have it 'unlocked'(you needed the pen trick with athlon).
and from my experience, the odds are that the individual screwing the cpu while overclocking could have screwed it up even without overclocking, that is, the person did something horribly stupid in the first place.
you don't need to overclock to end up with a fried chip because you didn't have the heatsink on, backwards or somehow horribly wrong settings on it.
so nothing new under the sky here, this device doesn't do anything new, or skew the chip prices into any direction(it's sales probably being very very very very marginal and very very very very few of those will on purpose break their chip with it so that they still would manage to get it replaced).
your comment makes it look like everyone using this product would fry their chip, however the loser seems to be the motherboad manufacturers(lose of potential mobo upgrader), no-one else. the winners would be the geeks after few years when they can source semi working computer skeletons and are trying to take most out of them and only happen to have an athlon with wrong settings and for some reason are afraid of the wire-tricks or soldering.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
If you've got the money to go out and buy a new 2500+ or faster Athlon then you won't be breaking the bank if you spend a little bit extra and get a new, more suitable motherboard to go with it?
Sure, there are a very few number of people out there (and I mean maybe a handful) who have systems that for whatever reason can't handle a motherboard swapout but, apart for that tiny subset, this isn't worth the effort.
Why go to this much trouble and risk - possibly ruining a brand new CPU in the process - for a small bump in performance when you could swap both parts at once with less hassle and for greater gain?
That old CPU and motherboard doesn't have to go to waste either - find a cheap case for it, put in a minimal amount of memory (assuming you didn't buy some new RAM as part of your upgrade), a cheap NIC and an old hard drive (even a 250MB drive!) and you've got a nice little runner that'll act as a nice firewall/server/whatever. Let's face it, if you're the kind of guy that would upgrade a PC's CPU to squeeze out a few more clock cycles then you're the kind of guy who'll have those kinds of parts lying around doing nothing.
This may seem like a cheap upgrade option but if you fry that new CPU then it'll turn out to be a very expensive one.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Someone that's willing to buy this device seems like they'd also be of the mindset to lie at the return counter if their CPU kills itself early after an Overclocking Session Gone Bad (TM).
I would have modded you down, but I didn't think that that would properly convey my reaction to this statement, which is : fuck you.
How in the hell do you conclude that anyone that wants to overclock is likely to be a liar as well?
I'm typing this on an overclocked system I built years ago -- why did I overclock? Because it saved me about $500 that I might have spent on a faster chip. Not because I'm somehow morally corrupt, or trying to swindle anyone.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
Most of my overclocking experience has shown me that it costs just about the same to go out and buy new parts. So then why in god's name would you bother buying something like this?
For one I attend lots of various LAN parties. I'm sure others who go will catch a similar situation if they have not.
Bob: "Hey Tom, Nice Box..."
Tom: "Thanks Bob... it's a stock AMD"
Bob: "Yeah, but did you see Vince's Water-cooled rig? I can't believe he got that 2100+ so high"
*Tom walks away in shame*
Mobo manufacturers: please bring back the 'TURBO' button from the good old 386 days.
Imagine, having a quiet computer idling away at say 500Mhz..more than enough to use email, write up documents, read slashdot. (all while the CPU remains relatively cool) Then, when you want to play Quake III or compile a Linux kernel, hit the TURBO on for 2000Mhz.
$cat