j.c.f.'s Overclocked Athlon
Project
Before we can start overclocking we have to crack the
ol' Athlon. Rumor had it that AMD was having trouble meeting the demand for 500MHz parts
and sure enough my Athlon was delayed (a little bit, it still came in weeks before the
other stuff) and if a chip fabricator has trouble meeting demand for a slower device in
time honored tradition they simply sell a fast part as the slower part. Here's the silicon
I got:
K7650! Smokin'! Kinda takes the fun out of it really,
800MHz is likely to be as fast as the 0.25 micron silicon is going to go and that only
makes it a 23% overclock, probably don't even need the TECs for that. Oh well, I guess
I'll get over it :)
On with the construction then, or at least the parts
first. Parts to begin with:
The cold plate used is actually about a 1/2"
taller than it needs to be in case I had to offset the heatsink above the motherboard. I
chose to use the hot plate of the Athlon to hold the SECC, not only because it has pins
and holes in all the right places (once you've knocked out the inner four posts anyway)
but because they also had nice little risers (or so I thought) for the cache chips:
The two semi-circular holes in the top are to make room
for the bolts that sandwich the TECs and hold the cold plate to the heatsink. The inner
four posts have been removed and their holes widened to allow the bolts that will hold the
CPU in place through. I didn't relish the notion of using the original CPU spring faster
scheme, that's a once off kind of affair (and, no, I don't just assemble this kind of rig
once). Those nice little risers for the cache? Not! AMD was happy with a huge gob of
thermal goop. I found some nice .020" thick copper plate and some 1/16" aluminum
plate to fill the indentations on the other side of the original hot plate:
The 1/16" aluminum is just a little bit too
think, not by much more than a couple of thou. though so I let it ride, thermal goop and a
bit of flex in the plate can take that up. So how to hold them nice little copper shims in
place then? Enter the egg carton Styrofoam again, only this time much more artfully
sculpted:
Next page: Egg Carton Rules!
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