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Olschool Socket-A time - Thornton cache unlock!

Soldato
Joined
19 Oct 2002
Posts
5,166
Location
The land of Cows n Grass!
Im quite chuffed at the moment, managed to pick up an old shuttle motherboard with a mint xp2000 thornton chip. Looks like the cpu was in this shuttle board from new so it physically it has not been molested and looks brand new. I was elated to find the chip is based on the Barton core with half of its cache disabled. Anyone who remembers the socket-a days will know amd would disable things by using a lazer to cut little groups of gold bridges.

So im off to get some silver conductive paint, or a one of those conductive pens used for fixing rear windscreen heaters on cars. The only thing nagging me is... will it work? is it worth it? The last time I did anything like this was when I had an Abit KT7 and a Duron 1300. It was a pita but it worked.
 
Let me check my watch...

...Yup still 2012

Anyway shouldn't laugh really as I'm trying to keep a couple of socket A systems running myself. I've got a big task this evening ahead of me :/
 
Same here! Im flogging away at keeping some old systems going only because they are built to do one thing. I cannot find anything thats modern that will do same task! Im still trying, got hold of some pci-e tv cards but havent bothered to actually try them as I know it will mean hassle :rolleyes:

I have an SN45GV2 & Barton 2800 here that was bought new in 2004. The psu has finally kicked the bucket so a new one has been ordered and I hope after a refresh it will continue to work, proper little workhorse that old shuttle :)
 
Blast from the past...did the pencil trick on a Duron and conductive silver paint from Halfords did for a couple of Athlons!!!
 
Ahhhh Socket A...takes me back, I had a 3200+ barton, and before that, a Duron. Those were the days that AMD could actually compete with Intel CPUs.
 
Did the pencil trick on my Duron 800 and 1Ghz AXIA, lasted years as well which surprised me, though i did cover it with tape. I think i did the conductive on a few XPs which were a little more difficult when they changed the packaging but definetly did it on a bunch of T Birds. Got a bunch of 100fsb AXIAs and KT133A boards and literally just FSB clocked them to 1333Mhz with almost no voltage jump.. made a couple quid on those (sold as clocked systems!). The mobile chips were amazing, think i used my 2500+ @ 2.4GHz for like 2yrs before going A64 :) Remember the original Athlon and goldfinger device? Those were some premo o'cin days :)


Too bad AMD have not been up to scratch, have never unlocked any extra cores at all or really seriously clocked any AMD chip since Conroe :(
 
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My server is running an xp3200+, and copes well with the filing demands I put on it :)

Who remembers OC'ing the celeron 300a slot 1 CPU's to 500mghz?
 
Who remembers OC'ing the celeron 300a slot 1 CPU's to 500mghz?

lol yep, good ol Abit BH6 and a whole 96mb of RAM took me to 500mhz, i believe around that time i was messing with a peltier unit as well. I had a 'golden' 400A that did 600MHz @ 2.3v i think.
 
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