News Sealed AMD Athlon XP 2000+ CPU stands the test of time — 22-year-old single-core "Thoroughbred" relic has never been turned on

[Royce1969]

Wasn't this the generation that could use the pencil trick? AMD CPU, nVidia motherboard chipset, ATI video card.... It was a strange time to build a PC

 

[mitch074]

Wasn't this the generation that could use the pencil trick? AMD CPU, nVidia motherboard chipset, ATI video card.... It was a strange time to build a PC

I think the XP chips were using organic packaging, and needed something a bit trickier (conductive pen) to work. The previous Athlon and the Duron, with ceramic packaging, could, indeed, use a pencil for that.
That trick unlocked the multiplier, and was needed for both over- and underclocking. I used it on mine, and apart from the system becoming unable to reboot (I had to do a complete power cycle), worked beautifully.

 

[YSCCC]

I think the XP chips were using organic packaging, and needed something a bit trickier (conductive pen) to work. The previous Athlon and the Duron, with ceramic packaging, could, indeed, use a pencil for that.
That trick unlocked the multiplier, and was needed for both over- and underclocking. I used it on mine, and apart from the system becoming unable to reboot (I had to do a complete power cycle), worked beautifully.

In my first trial of OC in that era, the pencil trick was a temporary testing method, just to test if the CPU is stable at that speed, if it was, use something more permanent like silver paint or solder a bypass strip of wire to make it perm solution. I managed to get a 1ghz to run at 1.4, which is a great plus for a 12 yo.

 

[mitch074]

In my first trial of OC in that era, the pencil trick was a temporary testing method, just to test if the CPU is stable at that speed, if it was, use something more permanent like silver paint or solder a bypass strip of wire to make it perm solution. I managed to get a 1ghz to run at 1.4, which is a great plus for a 12 yo.

Yeah, well, I was a poor student (that's why I bought a Duron 950, it was the most I could afford - I regretted not taking the Duron 1000, but the difference in price was whether I could eat that week or not) so I really couldn't afford the €15 such a pen cost at the time. Also, renewing the penciling once every year was enough to keep it working, so... Clean the system, change the paste, renew the pencil - kept that baby running for several years. It could even run Doom 3 ! I did manage to push it to 1133 MHz, but it was hot as hell and the performance was rather underwhelming, so - 933 MHz, scored 35% higher in benchmarks (Aquamark3, SuperPI) than default settings... Good enough for me.
My cousin bought a system around that time, it was a XP 2200+ - no trick on that one, merely sync'ed the FSB and RAM bus - BAM ! Instant performance boost.

 

[ravewulf]

As noted by many above, the CPU doesn't have a base/boost clock as we understand it today. Base cock here is the reference clock before the CPU multiplier of 12.5x is applied. Desktop CPUs this old didn't boost or downclock, they ran at a single frequency all the time (1667 MHz / 1.667 GHz here)

 

[Grobe]

I still having a real old computer that I built many years ago, having this CPU. I primarily use it to test 32 bit Linux distro on real hardware.