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."

Comments

Why bother?

[WIAKywbfatw]

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.