Written: 11/24/99
Written By: Moto Racer®
Athlon Supplied By: AMK Services

Now why would Moto want to take a perfectly nice AMD Athlon and rip it apart you ask? The first reason is because I can. The second is because if you want to overclock the AMD chip and you don't have a K7 overclocker's board like the Asus K7M, you will need to open up the Athlon to change it's speed settings. Another reason for ripping out the case is because the Athlon will run cooler once it's stripped down to bare PCB. The casing that house the CPU traps heat, not good if you plan to overclock.

While this article shows how to rip an Athlon apart, the same steps would be used if you want to take apart an old Pentium 2 since the housing is the same. So for those of you who have one of those nice SL2W8 PII-300 hanging around and want to remove the casing, just follow the same steps.

One word of caution. This operation is not for the weak at heart. Unlike the case screw method for removing a retail PIII heatsink, which is pretty safe to do, removing the Athlon casing could kill the CPU if you make a slip. I, of course, will not be held responsible.

You only require two tools to remove an Athlon casing, a big flat head screwdriver and a pair of needle nose pliers. The operation requires 2 steps. The first being to remove the casing. After that's off, you have to remove the CPU from the heat transfer plate. The second part of the operation is the most dangerous and requires the most care....or you may not have a CPU left.

Special thanks goes out the AMK Services for loaning the Athlon to be ripped. I'll try not to kill it. :-)

Next page: Removing the casing.

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