After stripping down the Athlon to bare PCB you will see a little plug-in above the L2 cache. There is suppose to be a device that plugs into there which allows you to change multiplier settings. However I have yet to see this device. Without it, you will need to do some soldering. Fun huh? :-)

The L2 cache used in this Athlon were NEC 3.6ns units. Good for up to 550Mhz. Which is correct since this is an Athlon 550.

This is the CPU core itself. Note that it say K7550 in the first line. This tells you this CPU is a 550Mhz Athlon. The interesting thing about this is I had a few friends open up their Athlon 500 and read the core it said K7650! I was not so lucky.

A closer look at the heat transfer plate shows that it has L2 cache spacers! I was like "Alright AMD!", till I took a little closer look.

L2 spacers are not very helpful if they don't make contact with the L2 cache itself. As you can see from the above photo, there is quite a bit of gap between the L2 cache and the L2 cache spacers on the heat transfer plate. Hmmm. better luck next time AMD.

Now that you have the Athlon down to bare PCB how do you cool it? After all, the holes don't line up with any P3 heatsink and no P2 heatsink will work on it while it's out of the casing. Join me next time as I continue my Athlon build up by putting an Alpha P3125 cooler on stripped Athlon 550. Till next time, happy overclocking. :)

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