Unlocking Athlon 64 multiplier

[scoyle]

Ok, I'm sure this has been answered before here, but I can't find it so I have to ask.

On previous athlon cores, I.E. athlon xp thunderbird cores, you could unlock the multiplier by closing an L1 or L3 bridge. This could also be accomplished by placing a conductive metal loop around two of the pins in the back of the processor.

I am wondering if it is possible to unlock the multiplier by placing a copper wire over two pins in the back, or if when you take the heat spreader off, you can accomplish this by closing certain bridges.

I've overclocked every chip I've owned since my Pentium 2 333Mhz with a 440BX board, and I'm not particularly into overclocking the fsb. The reason for this is my ram is value ram, and is probably not overclockable much beyond 200Mhz, its stock speed. I would rather leave my ram at its stock speed and possibly tighten the timings a little bit than overclock a small amount in a futile attempt to catch my rising fsb frequency.

Please let me know if this is possible, and if you would like me to dig up the article (from Tom's) about the copper wire trick, let me know. Thank you.

 

[mdd1963]

"Please let me know if this is possible, and if you would like me to dig up the article (from Tom's) about the copper wire trick, let me know. Thank you.
"

Unlocking multiplier on A64's is not possible...

But cranking up the "fsb" is....

ANy decent NF3 or NF4 mb will let you run your memory asyncronously to the FSB, in efect changing ratios. (HTT ratio may need adjusting as well, down to 4 from standard 5)

(You can run the mem clock at 166 with a proc FSB of 200, and every 1 MHz overclock adds to the *both* totals, allowing for instance, 234 FSB while still having mem at stock 200 MHZ speeds...(166 + 34) ;there are other ratios depending on mainboard and BIOS ), and many actually use *LOWER* multipliers, which are not prohibited on the A64, to run FSB's of 300 or more.

 

[scoyle]

So, do the processors have a different method of reading whether or not the multiplier is locked? I'm sure it has to read it from somewhere...

 

[hella-d]

Socket 939 Opterons And FXs Are Unlocked

 

[scoyle]

Quite aware of that. But why, physically, can't an Athlon64 CPU be unlocked? Are there not any tricks, like the pencil trick or connecting pins with wire...?

 

[scoyle]

That's not fair, I think I was a little more articulate than that.

I guess what I'm asking is: "Does anyone know how they locked the multiplier?"

I then brought into light examples of how it was done on past cores, and questioned whether or not it has been done in a similar way on the new cores, and if so, if they could also be modified to have an unlocked multiplier.

 

[scoyle]

That's the sad, sad piece of information I was looking for. I should have bought a 64 3200 with a 10x multiplier. Damn.

Oh well, I have the E3 core, so far it's overclocked to 2506 (278x9), 1.45v, 52*C at full load on the retail heatsink/fan combo. Sounds like it will get up to 2700 (300x9) easily, just wonder how much voltage it will take.

As far as the ram in my system, when I left the ram divider (which is labeled in a way that suggets it is the actual speed of the ram) on 400 mhz, which is cpu/9 (a.k.a. my fsb setting), the ram would clock to 233 mhz and seem stable. I was happy with that, but in order to further overclock my CPU, i had to raise the fsb and lower the ram divider. I have it at 266Mhz (cpu/14) so my ram runs at 179 mhz. When I try for 300Mhz fsb, the ram will run at about 214 Mhz, which it should be able to handle with reasonable memory timings. It will still be a bottleneck, but 214Mhz allows more data to be processed than 200Mhz!

How fun.

 

[scoyle]

I haven't really tried to get as much as possible out of the ram yet. The timings are 7-3-3-2.5 1t, I believe, which is just about borderline. I think I'm just lazy; I hate clearing my CMOS every time I get a memory error ;p

 

[benktlottie]

Socket 939 Opterons And FXs Are Unlocked

FX chips are unlocked, Opterons ARE NOT. All Athlon64 chips are unlocked DOWNWARDS, not upwards. Visit XS, they have been trying to unlock normal athlon for ages, and nobody has achieved it yet

 

[tenaciousleydead]

there was a way to unlock the 1.8ghz amd durons to 256k cache but im not gonna bother looking for it, i think it was pretty dangerous anyway. and there probably is a way to unlock semprons it just depends if the cache is good or not.