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Teach An Old Athlon New Tricks

Posted by timothy on from the you-dog-you dept.

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."

5 of 210 comments (clear)

  1. Will heatsinks work? by klui · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Because the chip rests on top of an adaptor, it would make the CPU sit higher. Wouldn't this present a problem with heatsinks? i.e. clamps that may use more force, or not able to reach the attachments.

    1. Re:Will heatsinks work? by ic3p1ck · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Not just that, but the temperature sensor is typically located under the chip, with this adaptor it probably wont make contact with the CPU anymore.

  2. Re:Choked Bus? by rice_web · · Score: 4, Interesting

    And the jump from 333 to 400 is incredibly small and had Tom's Hardware jumping all over the claimed speed of the Athlon XP.

    Granted, an increase in the FSB helps a lot, but not as much in, say, a Pentium 4 or an IBM 970, where a large FSB is vital. The Athlon is comparatively simple, and the 400MHz FSB is overkill.

    Again, an Athlon XP 3000+ will be faster on a DDR400 system than in my old 133MHz FSB system.

    --
    The Political Programmer
  3. Strange by autopr0n · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Actually when I upgraded from my socket-7 mobo to my Abit Kt7 RAID my uptime in windows 98 went from about 12-24 hours to a solid week. I was amazed. The old k6 system crashed all the time. With win2k I routinely get uptimes of several weeks, and almost always the reason for the reboot is due something other then a whole crash (like my sound drivers or explorer or whatever will get 'weird').

    And I've got cheap-ass ram in here to boot. I've been pretty impressed with the reliability so far.

    I do wonder though if this adaptor will cause any problems. For one, the thermal sensor will no longer be in contact with the actual device, and for another the pin lengths will be longer. Could cause some problems...

    --
    autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
    1. Re:Strange by antiMStroll · · Score: 4, Interesting
      I have a KT-7 and KT-7a RAID boards and they're incredibly sensitive to RAM, especially running memory interleave or any other BIOS speed option. Additional major factors: BIOS firmware versions and PCI card placement (the board shares slot IRQs with some of the embedded devices). Work out the details though and they're very solid. From the KT-7 now doing doing duty as a FreeBSD server:

      amd700# uptime 7:28PM up 23 days, 23:10, 1 user, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

      It was shut down to rewire the rack. It's never gone down on its own. (Yeah, I know. Not the most strenuous load.)