Written
: 2/16/2001
Written by:
Moto
AMD is on a roll. Clock speed for clock speed, their
Thunderbird processor is faster and less expensive than Intel's Pentium III.
While Intel has trouble making their Pentium stable at 1000Mhz, AMD has their
CPU running 200Mhz faster. And just like the Intel counterpart, the AMD CPUs are
just as overclockable, with many Durons 700 and Thunder 750 able to run at
1000Mhz.
Since many sites have done articles on overclocking the
slower speed CPUs, I figure it would be fun to take AMD's top of the line CPU
and overclock the hell out of it. Thanks to
The Over Clockerz Store
for supplying the 1200Mhz T Bird for this little fun fest. To give the CPU its
best chance of surviving this ordeal, I ordered up my favorite AMD cooler, the
Alpha PAL6035.
Before we begin, the normal disclaimer. Overclocking can
damage or kill your CPU. I thought I blew up the 1200 TBird for awhile when it
gave me nothing but a bunch of beeps. This is not to say that overclocking is
unsafe. In most cases you're not really overclocking your CPU at all. You're
just running the CPU at the speed it was intended to run at, but AMD decided to
mark the speed down and sell it as a lower speed chip because there is still
demand for them. This is why you see so many TBird 750 running at 900 to
1000Mhz.
There are two ways to overclock an AMD processor; increase
the bus speed or increase the multiplier. The preferred method has always been
to increase the multiplier because until recently, AMD motherboards has been
unstable at bus speed above 115Mhz. However, the new wave of motherboards based
on the new VIA KT133A chipset promises to change all that.
To overclock an AMD processor by changing the multiplier
requires us to unlock the CPU first. This is very simple to do. All you need is
a mechanical pencil. We'll do that next.
Next page: How to pick a lock
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