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AMD Athlon XP 2000+ Review 6 Weeks Before Release 175
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.
Please (Score:3, Funny)
As far as I can tell, one product named XP is one too many.
Re:Please (Score:1)
Re:Please (Score:1)
Re:Please (Score:1)
However, now that we've had the Pentium Pro, II, III and 4 I really think it's time for Intel to use a little creativity. Of course, part of the problem it that Intel was a little too clever for their own good and have now painted themselves into a corner. Sexium, Septium and Octium just don't sound as nice.
Re:Please (Score:2)
I dunno. Sexium... mmmm... I can see that selling to, uh, lonely geeks ;)
Re:Please (Score:2)
simple. they mean that you need at least this class of processor to make WinXP usable.
at least that's my theory :)
Re:Please (Score:1)
it's most interesting when you're playing a DirectX game full screen, when the MSN Messenger crap comes in the lower right of the screen, all garbled because it shoult not be showing up at all.
-sam
Re:Please (Score:1)
Re:Please (Score:1)
Like the way AMD is going (Score:1)
Re:Like the way AMD is going (Score:1)
I guess they're doing this because the 'basic' tec is good enough
Risky ... (Score:1)
And AMD's processors literally went up in smoke!
No doubt you should have a fire extinguisher near!
:-)
Re:Risky ... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Risky ... (Score:2, Interesting)
thanks for the warning... (Score:1, Troll)
We're all (most) adults here, there's no need to remind us of the consequences of our actions. If you put up warnings for this, you should put up warnings every time a kernel release story is out - "caution. This kernel may cause unstability, security holes, poor performance, oily discharge, etc".
~z
Re:thanks for the warning... (Score:2, Insightful)
If Slashdot doesn't print those warnings, could it be interpreted that they are encouraging behaviour that may physically destroy your system (and not "merely" cause downtime)?
Humor Transplant Needed (Score:1)
I've seen those sort of tongue-in-cheek warnings on "new cool software" too.
Re:thanks for the warning... (Score:1)
frankly, there are days when it seems to me that they should start teaching kids in elementary school how to write legally-binding disclaimer statements. not only for liability, but probably also for protection regarding ficticious works. recall the kids who have been punished for writing stories their teachers found offensive (i.e. relating to school shootings). was it appropriate? probably not. are there more appropriate ways to deal with this kind of thing? probably... but at this point, I'm waayyy off topic, so I'll shut up.
Re:thanks for the warning... (Score:1)
No wait, *I* knew that was supposed to be funny. I wonder who would be so dull as to think otherwise?
Just what we need... (Score:1, Redundant)
Re:Just what we need... (Score:2, Interesting)
> company out of Redmond?
Well... not with the software company itself but when Microsoft spends huge amounts of $ to make everyone associate that "XP" with "modern, fast, up-to-date, stable,
wow, the cluetrain really left you at the station (Score:2, Interesting)
as has been stated on
they stand for different things, etc.
try doing a little investigation before you just blurt out some random stupidity.
...dave
Re:wow, the cluetrain really left you at the stati (Score:2)
do a google search it'll turn up (Score:1)
i'm too busy, lazy and apathetic to bother.
Re:wow, the cluetrain really left you at the stati (Score:1)
Re:wow, the cluetrain really left you at the stati (Score:2)
Re:Just what we need... (Score:5, Funny)
About 1900 years too late (Score:1)
Re:Just what we need... (Score:1)
More Hewlett Packards?
Ewwwwwww...
Re:Just what we need... (Score:1)
Meanwhile, I will ignore it and happily keep using an awesome 1.4ghz chip that smokes Intel chips costing twice as much.
Re:Just what we need... (Score:2, Interesting)
AMD + XP = AXP.
AMD has quite a few features from the Alpha processor, so I guess this is not too far-fetched.
Re:Just what we need... (Score:1)
Marketing (Score:1)
I think there numbering system though is a bit subjective. Consumers probably won't understand what 1600+ really means.
-Blake
Other hw sites have already done this. (Score:1, Insightful)
the good toms hardware (Score:5, Insightful)
But this article just goes to show you why Tom's Hardware is the best hardware review site out there, just like it has always been. Over the years, Tom has written some of the best articles for hardware enthusiasts and has pushed "overclocking", a term which was once mysterious, into one of the big issues of modern computing. Motherboards are now being designed specifically for overclocking, and this has lead to huge increases in performance. Most people forget that Tom's Hardware has been one of the most influential sites as far as this is concerned.
It's good to see what is undesputably the best current article on technology. I hope even those who hate Tom's Hardware will see the light. No other tech site has anywhere near the ability to do stuff like this.
-NeoTomba
Re:the good toms hardware (Score:4, Insightful)
Looking at the benchmarks, doing this is NOT worth the time and effort.
Tom has the time and money to dink around with these types of things. It might be worth it to him, but this article is likely worthless to 99.9% of his readers, simply because they aren't going to do it.
Compare this with overclocking a Celeron, I bet over 50% of the readers gave it a try. Writing those articles were actually relevant. I'm sorry to say that this one isn't.
Re:the good toms hardware (Score:2)
Re:the good toms hardware (Score:1)
Yep, that is the olden days, already. The BX platform is dead, and the old overclockable Celerons are basically long gone.
I also think that overclocking will be less relevant in the future. Unless I can take my 5 GHz Athlon to 6+ GHz with relative ease, I'm not going to care much.
Golden age, yes; olden days, certainly not. (Score:1)
Not that I ever saw a 286 boosted more than 4 MHz, but that was still a 33% increase. Testing? Who needs testing?
Overclocking was never so fun after you started being able to do it all with jumpers (or, God forbid, in the BIOS). And once the Celeron 300A came along... well, it just lost all its mystique. Remember, geeks lose interest in popular things. I haven't overclocked since a brief stint with an old K5-100 at 150. (Very brief.) You mark my words, Linux will lose friends quickly if it ever sits on more than 10% of the world's PCs...
Re:Golden age, yes; olden days, certainly not. (Score:2)
Sounds like a Yogi Berra-ism: "Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded."
Re:the good toms hardware (Score:2)
Re:the good toms hardware (Score:2)
The AT was the biggest (and most powerful) box I had at that job. By the time I left it had 2 20MB drives in it. I pretty much mirrored all the interesting tools on the IBMPC internal BBS, and could still backup the first disk onto the second.
Re:the good toms hardware (Score:2)
Mmm... I would call it valuable for a couple of reasons. One, it's geeky, so it has some interest to me whether I'm going to do it now, some time in the future, or never. Two, it's a good indication of just how stable a processor is, and how close the manufacturer is setting the "recommended" clock speed to its "maximum" speed.
One other thing is, we're overclocking now by as many cycles as processors ran at full speed just a few years ago. Impressive or not, it's still interesting to watch people shrug at speed improvements they couldn't have imagined a decade ago.
Relevance of Publications (Score:4, Funny)
Many publications do pointless things. Not always is the point "this matters". Sometimes it is "isn't this some cool shit?"
Like the Linux kernel source. I'm not going to monkey with it, but a handful of others will.
Not only overclocing but testing the new XP 2000+! (Score:1)
- overclock the processor. OK that's geeky, not that much a performance gain compared to the old-days, but that's still funny. That's like this guy who put his PSX into a portable console. Not many people will do it, but that's fun
- second point and that's why Tom's principaly did it, is to be able to test the XP 2000+ 6 weeks before it is out. Isn't that a nice thing to know?
Even for AMD the news is good: it creates publicity 6 weeks before their processor is out, 'against' their will (didn't they protect the processor against overclocking?) and the risk of people overclocking the thing is small.
Re:the good toms hardware (Score:1)
Besides, all the chip companies have to do to get massive overclocking is to underrate the chips. If intel had properly rated their Celerons rather than marking them down to fill the marketplace you wouldn't have had that huge gain.
Re:the good toms hardware (Score:3, Insightful)
No offense intended, but it's only a big issue among the script kiddies of the computing world. Everyone else just thinks "Hmmm...I could get a 10% higher clock speed, for a total system throughput increase of 2%, and there's the chance I'll either destroy and expensive processor or gain hard to track system stability problems. Or I could just let well alone. No contest."
Re:the good toms hardware (Score:2)
You might want to look at icrontic.com [icrontic.com] or at this blurb about how to use trace tape to unlock the Athlon XP [plycon.com]. I know I saw the latter something like a week before I saw the Tom's Hardware article.
Re:the good toms hardware (Score:1)
LEXX
Re:the good toms hardware (Score:1)
Re:the good toms hardware (Score:1)
I just got an rma for a 1600+ (Score:1)
Re:I just got an rma for a 1600+ (Score:1)
Re:I just got an rma for a 1600+ (Score:1)
Unfortunately, you will probably have to get out the soldering iron and a 150-200 ohm SMD resistor to fix the board. Damn ECS is pretending the problem doesn't exist, but I have three K7S5A boards and three AMD CPUs saying otherwise. Grrr.
A K7S5A message board [ocworkbench.com]
Will people buy it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Very nice ... BUT (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:Very nice ... BUT (Score:2)
AMD has been playing it very safe on clockspeed to make sure infrastructure is in place to get better performance (& not overwhelm or hurt next years profits due to performance beign to similiar between Athlon & Clawhammer). Tom is just an Id10t so he managed a whole speed grade increase with his oc... Wonder if he even bothered to use a non-standard heatsink... But I'm not about to read the crap he puts out to find out...
Connect 2 contacts. (Score:4, Informative)
although, keep in minde this is not for the faint hearted. you will also need a conductive lacquer to connect the contacts, tape, super glue, a scalpel, and multimeter. I don't know about you guys, but I think when all this is required to overclock your CPU, it's a bit much for the rewards you get.
Also, for most users, the faster processors like this new AMD are so fast anyways, that overclocking them will probably give a faster experience only in benchmarks, and not in real user experience. It's a cool article, none the less - but if you just bought one of these babies, would You want to pull out all these tools to overclock it?
I would play it safe and be happy with my already fast computer.
Re:Connect 2 contacts. (Score:1, Interesting)
Now, if you could take the very cheapest XP and achieve the same results, I might be interested....like the old celeron 300a that would clock right up to 450mhz by simply changing the bus speed from 66mhz to 100mhz. Those were the days. 8-)
It is pretty interesting that the high end athlons spank the 2ghz P4 in most benchmarks and cost about 50% as much (and you get to use geek friendly DDR memory instead of paying through the nose for evil RDRAM).
Re:Connect 2 contacts. (Score:1)
Well, I don't know about the RDRAM, but my DDR [ddrfreak.com] memory is terrable. Maybe it's that I don't practice enough, but I can only keep one or two arrows in my memory at once. I suppose that it is geek friendly though, most geeks that I know are too embarrased to ask a girl to dance...
Re:Connect 2 contacts. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Connect 2 contacts. (Score:1)
Re:Connect 2 contacts. (Score:2)
<humor>I just hope they use soap and deoderant to clean their pits.</humor>
Nice!! (Score:2)
I didn't think the current process would go above 1.5 with standard cooling, this is good news
Now where are those Nvidia boards...
Re:Nice!! (Score:1)
But Intel engineers said that they have inspected the new Athlon XP and its made with
(Even if AMD says they didnt.. )
hmm (Score:3, Funny)
How much difference will this make? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Maybe I can buy an AMD chip (Score:4, Offtopic)
MyDollars (Score:3, Funny)
Illegal (Score:5, Funny)
In addition, since it makes Ahtlons explode it can be construed as a terrorist act under the recent counter-terrorism act.
In short, Tom will be shot at dawn.
Be very careful if you do decide to overclock. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Be very careful if you do decide to overclock. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Be very careful if you do decide to overclock. (Score:2)
Re:Be very careful if you do decide to overclock. (Score:1)
In practice, you will always need paste (unless you had a surface like this [harvard.edu], where if you blew it up to the size of colorado the biggest flaw would be one inch tall!)
Re:Be very careful if you do decide to overclock. (Score:1)
Re:Is mentally undressing women banned by DMCA? (Score:2)
Yes. The day Congress repeals it or the Supreme Court strikes it down.
HTH.
superglue (Score:4, Informative)
Some superglue manufacturers offer a thicker type that doesn't run quite as eagerly as the liquid type. It is more the consistency of model airplane glue so you have more control as to where the glue actually goes. It can be found at hardware stores and any place that offers a decent selection of adhesives. This may be a better solution than hoping and preying that your masking job is adequate and liquid superglue does seem to have a mind of it own sometimes as my fingers will testify.
How about skipping the superglue altogether? (Score:4, Informative)
By the by, this all seems like a lot of effort for little payback. Some of you may not want to do this.
Re:superglue (Score:2)
Another possibility might be to just route the ink around the holes...it's a bit tricker than making a straight line, but steady hands, a fine-tipped paintbrush, and a magnifier ought to do the trick
Tom's hardware of Burning Tbirds. (Score:1)
That was my first response.
Now consider that Tbirds and P4's produce the same "horsepower" or have the same "oomph" despite one being 2Ghz and the other 1.4+.
Ok, with that in mind, don't forget that the acutal size of the processor. The actual chip part of an athlon is, what?, 1/4 the size of a p4?
Not only that but the p4 has a heat spreader (or first stage heatsync?) where the Athlon does not (almost typed in doe snot..heh, I love typoes).
I'm sure thermodynamics ~= a simple physics question:
Which exerts more force an elephant with a foot that has a 6" radius or a 100lbs female in high heel shoes (down, boy) with a 1/4" wide heel?
The hinting was at which would hurt more, in essence. It went against most ppl's intuition.
More force (or pain.) would be delivered by the 100lbs female on that 1/4" surface area.
Similar reasoning applies to the Athlon. All that heat, on that small area. Did not help that the thermal shutdown sensor on the MB's did not poll quick/good enough (maybe the MB's were made in Florida, dunno. Cheap shot, sorry).
Funny thing is this: if you did overclock, most likely you would leave the case's side off and would notice. And it is getting to the point with heat syncs that either liquid cooling systems are going to be needed soon, or anchoring it to the MB, a la p4's, is the next step.
Either way I am going to build an AMD system soon before prices go up...only drawback is how to muffle the sound of dual 7k rpm fans w/o putting the thing outside.
Cheers ppl.
Re:Tom's hardware of Burning Tbirds. (Score:1)
I bought a HSF (heatsink/fan, a GlobalWin FOP32-1) for my 1Ghz Tbird a year ago that worked well but was very noisy. I recently replaced this with a new cooler (an Antec JetCool) which is equally efficient and much quieter. I have seen a new emphasis on quieter cooling with a number of other products too.
Force vs. pressure (Score:1)
The elephant foot exerts a lot more force. The heel exerts more pressure (even when you account for the fraction of the weight resting on the toe).
Interestingly, if you work it out, the elephant's foot places about the same pressure on the ground as an automobile tire.
Superglue. Now 1002 uses. (Score:2, Funny)
I'm sure the song by Huey Lewis "Happy to be stuck with you" will surge in popularity for a brief moment.
Hamfisted... (Score:1)
Overclocking... (Score:1)
To be blunt, there's some dickwaving going on here, as always. 1900 to 2000? Big whippity whoop, especially considering the effort and cost dangers.
Inadequate testing (Score:4, Informative)
Tom's Hardware is also using the wrong tools for the job. Even other overclockers [mac.com] know better. There are pens for writing PC board traces with conductive ink. Using conductive paint and tape is doing it the hard way.
Re:Inadequate testing (Score:2)
My limited experiece with conductive ink makes me think the stuff woulden't work too well on a searing hot processor. It doesn't adhear to smooth surfaces too well that are under stress - a circut board would be fine, but a processor that goes though heat cycles, would make me think that it would flake off over time. The Mac people probably get away with it because the PowerPC processors run cooler than the electricity hungry Athlon. Just my $.02 ($.01 after taxes.)
Re:Inadequate testing (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Inadequate testing (Score:1)
But, I do agree a few days of non-stop testing is required before you can make an accurate judgement.
Why overclock? (Score:1)
Also, how reliable would this overclocked CPU be after a few months? What if the superglue or L1 contacts overheat and breaks a connection?
Re:Why overclock? (Score:1)
Home much time. (Score:1)
Overclocking is evil! (Score:2, Funny)
However, the maximum setting is currently limited to 12.5X, which allows you to reach a clock speed of 1666 MHz (12.5 X 133 MHz = 1666 MHz) without having to increase the front side-bus clock speed
Or maybe what is being said is that the Athlon XP's are wickedly fast
You be the judge
"Crack the processor?" (Score:1, Funny)
I didn't need any help doing that. I've managed that my self before!
"we also show benchmark results that demonstrate the jump in the performance of the Athlon XP/MP"
Mine performance jumped right into the trash can after I "cracked" it.
What about the FBS? (Score:2, Insightful)
I think XP is just begging for more FSB. Cranking it up to say 300Mhz (2x150MHz), would increase the actual MHz of the CPU, and it would nicely increase you bandwidth (both memory and FSB).
Of course, I would much rather have the Clawhammer with it's 800MHz FSB...
Very, Very, VERY old news... (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know why people think that Tom's is a particularly good source anymore. These days they really seem to be slow off the mark...
Better Method and Reversible (Score:1)
several dead processors" before they figured this out. Especially since other hardware sites had posted this a week or two ago. Guess they had to read the articles and find out how to do it.
Check out VR Zone's method. Much better and reversible.
http://www.vr-zone.com/guides/AMD/AthlonXPUnlock/ [vr-zone.com]
Tech Stats
http://www.oc-athlonxp.com/bridges/ [oc-athlonxp.com]
XP vs MP? (Score:2)
I'd kill to have a Dual 2000+ MP system...
You didn't get it.. (Score:1)
Re:Bypassing security to overclock (Score:4, Informative)