The Mother Board

So You just got that off-the-foundry fresh Athlon XP, but you want more performance... Overclocking will do the trick, but it just won't allow you to hit the FSB speeds you want to. This is where Unlocking comes into play. By unlocking the cpu, you can gain access to it’s multipliers; the devices which multiply the FSB speed to get the core clock. Currently, there are many ways of doing this, but we’ll just concentrate on three for now: the L1 Bridge Trick (or pencil trick back in the day), going under the bridge, and finally the Socket Trick.

The L1 Bridge trick will work with All Athlon XPs, but is the most difficult to do. After all, who wants to cross tiny bridges with conductive goo....

For those of you who want to try it out, guides can be found in the following places:

The Pencil Trick for Thunderbirds (T-birds) and Durons only.
http://www.motherboards.org/articlesd/h ... /41_1.html

The Conductive Fluid Trick for Palominos and locked Thoroughbreds.
http://www.vr-zone.com/guides/AMD/AthlonXPUnlock/ for the complete Do It Yourselfer and
http://www.highspeedpc.com/XPUnlockingK ... ctions.htm if you want to pick up an unlocking kit already set up.


Going Under The Bridge is rather simple - All that has to be done is to join two pins together with a wire. It is essentially the same thing as the socket trick.
*NOTICE* Going under the bridge, as well as the socket trick ONLY work with Thoroughbreds (or T-Breds) and Bartons.
(Chip Models : 1700+ (Some) 1800+ (Some) 2200+, 2400+, 2500+, 2600+, 2700+, 2800+, and 3000+)
To identify if your chip is a T-bred, look for a long rectangular core - Palominos have square cores. Another way to identify what cpu you have is to look at the numbers and letters on the top of the cpu. If it says AXxxxx (where xxxx is the speed number like 1700), then it is a Palomino. If it says AXDAxxxx, then it is either a Thoroughbred or a Barton.

To Go under the bridge, short the same two pins as in the Socket Trick, except tie the pins that need to be shorted using a length of conductive wire. (See Socket Trick For Length)

The Socket Trick
This is like going under the bridge - but you will more than likely have to remove your motherboard to get to it. The image of the correct pins to short is here http://www.lostcircuits.com/cpu/amd_unlock/pins2.jpg .
Do note that these pins are shown on a socket in the standard North - South Orientation. Make sure you see where the angled notches are located at the top of the socket so that you short the correct pins.

Finally - The latter two tricks will only unlock lower multipliers, allowing you to drop the multiplier and push up the FSB. Thus making it possible to get a 200 MHz FSB on an A7N8x and running DDR400 at full speed as an example.

Post Your Success Stories and Issues Here.

Tulatin

Thanks to Tolemac for additions, editing and posting this.

So with me having an Athlon XP 2100+ should I attempt to unlock it so i can up the multiplier? Right now I just have the FSB running at 152mhz. Is running at that FSB slowing down my PC2700 memory performance or I am I fine doing it this way without unlocking the processor?

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Athlon 64 3200, DFI nF4-DAGF, 2x1gb Crucial, GeForce 7800GT 256mb, 250gb SATA WD
Athlon XP 2100, Gigabyte GA-7VAXP, 2x256MB Kingston, GeForce 4 Ti 4200 64mb, 80gb WD SE

If your able to run 152fsb then your mobo has allready unlocked it for you. You can try to lower the multiplier and up the fsb (12x166fsb=1992mhz) this is probably where you are now?

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3500+ Asus A8V
ATI X800XTPE
1gb Corsair PC3200LL

1. overclock by unlocking and raising multiplier to get cpu frequency higher. fsb will be static, and unchanged.
2. overclock by raising fsb to get frequency of cpu higher. multiplier can't be raised higher (locked cpu), but could be lowered to attempt a higher overall OC. raising fsb will raise agp port, pci bus, and memory frequency, so making adjustments in the bios becomes necessary to keep the pci, and agp frequencies from going too high.

btw, i am by no means an expert on OC, but believe the basic statements above to be true.

Shouldn't this post be modified a little considering all T-breds and Bartons are unlocked to begin with?

um... which way are they unlocked?

I can raise and lower my multipliers at will. Some boards however, don't give you that option, but that's the board design, not the chip.

I think this is due to the fact that hte boards unlock the chips for you... as to teh guide, it was made before they started being unlocked...

Is there some other way to increase the multiplier if the bios does not have an adjustment for it? For example my AMD 2500+ is at the moment OCd to 3200+ at 2079Mhz by increasing the FSB from 166Mhz to 189Mhz and is running great (CPU temp is at 68c under 100% CPU usage) now I would like to increase the multiplier which is currently set at 11.0.....the bios has no setting to adjust the multiplier. So how do I do it?

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there is the technique of tying pins - it's the interactive pin mod for athlon xp on this list - http://www.ocinside.de/html/main_workshop.html - or directly, here - http://www.ocinside.de/html/workshop/pi ... inmod.html this should help you out.