Despite the tape travails, it
didn't actually take very long to turn a mild-mannered Athlon into the bolt-through-the-neck
monstrosity you see here. The bare CPU circuit board doesn't have anything
to hold it in place, so a couple of hacked-up retainers from the Eagle slotket
I reviewed here were used to wedge the corners. They work very well, but
a better solution is to just replace the plastic half of the CPU case; you
can mount the Arctic Circle kit with or without the plastic.
I had high hopes for this setup.
Lots of people with 500MHz Athlons, especially late-model ones like mine,
run them at 700MHz, 750MHz or even 800MHz - often without needing to goose
the voltage much.
Did I get performance this good?
Heck, no.
650MHz was OK at 1.7 volts,
but I had to wind the CPU up to 1.8 volts to get it to run at 700MHz, and
it was unacceptably unstable even at 1.85V. You can pump up the voltage
further - the FreeSpeed instructions go up to 1.9V, and they've since mentioned
on their site how to set the frankly 1.95, 2.00 and 2.05V as well - but
anything above 1.8V isn't terribly wise, even with a huge cooler.
Not that a 650MHz Athlon is
a slow computer, by anybody's standards. Pretty much any desktop computing
task you care to name will scream along on this hardware. But it's still
a disappointment that I got what appears to be the one darn A-500 from the
end of last year that doesn't want to go like blazes.
Faster Athlons, especially the
newer 0.18 micron models, are happy to run at higher speeds, within the
limitations of their cache RAM. You can, by nerve-wracking circuit board
soldering, change the Athlon cache timing to allow higher core speeds, but
slowing down the cache eats some of your advantage and makes the hack barely
worth doing. Nonetheless, if you can afford to start with a 750MHz 0.18
micron Athlon, 1000MHz is not out of the question.
Unless, of course, you happen
to be me.
Conclusions
Overclocking an Athlon is actually
pretty easy. Popping open the case is no big deal. Overclock cards like
the FreeSpeed Pro are simple enough to use. And there are plenty of coolers,
led by the mighty P7125, which will do a good enough job of sucking the
heat out of your processor without making you mutilate clips and remove
the thermal plate.
By all accounts, there aren't
many dud Athlons out there - especially among recently manufactured processors.
But it looks as if I got one, and you might too; there are no guarantees
in overclocking.
Even if your processor doesn't
overclock worth beans, though, you'll still have a CPU that's darn good
value compared with a P-III. And you'll probably have a CPU that's substantially
faster than the one your friend who's waiting to be able to actually buy
a fast P-III is using in the meantime.
So I think it's fair to say
that, even in my case, the Athlon's a great bit of gear.
