j.c.f.'s Overclocked Athlon Project

Posted: 12/16/99
Written by: j.c.f.

So AMD goes ahead and build their K7, only it's not a K7, it's an Athlon (oh) and actually not only closes the gap on Intel's Pentium III (as it was then before they shrunk it's die using a 0.18 micron process instead of 0.25), but on many benchmarks it actually beat the thing! I'm like, go baby! And then the competition on the home front for the machine gets a little tense, what with teenage girl game playing and significant other paper writing and it's time to build the second home machine. By this time I've got xDSL so networking the buggers is not a big deal anymore and then there's this little matter of the unlocked multiplier on the Athlon, sign me up baby!

Kyrotech is out there pushing Athlons to 800MHz and beyond so I figure hey, a couple of MECI TECs, a really big fan and a 500MHz Athlon should be good for 750MHz, the golden 50% overclock. Not bad, $200 for a CPU that's faster than anything else currently being sold that's built to operate without a refrigerator.

The Theory.

If you check the specs out on the Athlon it's going to be dumping about 50W at 700Mhz. Wow! So I figure if I'm going to be jacking the voltage up and adding another 50MHz to that I'm looking at dumping some serious heat here. Hence a couple of TECs. But there's a bright side to all this current going to drive the TECs, the Athlon sucks juice like it's going out of fashion and then there's the supposed FIC SD-11 mother board's additional finicky nature (the one I'll be using), there's almost nothing like too much power supply current on the 5V and 3.3V rails. Well the TECs become current shunts if run between the 12V and 5V rails for a potential difference of 7V, my preferred way of running the TECs anyway, pumping another 4 to 6 amps or so into the 5V rail, should be gravy. If the TECs need it I can always crack open the power supply and buss out the 3.3V rail which gives 8.7V on the TECs and boosts the current available on the 3.3V rail directly.

The Practice.

So when my new power supply and case eventually show up I'm all a sweat as to exactly which power supply the Computer-X-Press have shipped me, they couldn't tell me what it was, "Oh no sir, it's a 'generic' 300W power supply". If you check the Athlon page out not all 300W power supplies are equal, some have more current on the 5V and 3.3V rails than others and you need 150W according to AMD, but these guys can't tell me so I'm punting here.   

Anyway, the supply shows up, and guess what? It's not a stinking 300W supply at all, it's a 235W POWERMAN FPS235-60GT. I tell you, I was ready to nuke these freaks. So they're shipping me another but until then I'm supposed to just sit idly by? When it took over month for the first order to get here? No sir! I pulled out the calc. and just see what this power supply is made of, and much to my surprise, it adds up to something like 156W on the 5V and 3.3V rail. Power On!

Next page: 750Mhz, here we come!

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