Is slot A dead?

[UNintel]

I've got a 550mhz Athlon on a ASUS K7M motherboard (Slot A). Does it make any sense to upgrade to a faster Slot A cpu or should I just junk it and move to a socket A platform?

 

[Blayze]

in my opinion it depends on how much you can get a new Slot A chip for.

There are also Slot A Athlon "Thunderbird" chips too, this might be a cheaper upgrade path for you.

 

[ericd]

The simple answer is that yes Slot A is dead. In fact only the motherboards that support the Slot A thunderbird are ones that are based off the AMD 751 Northbridge (the K7M just happens to be one of these) so yes there is a upgrade path for you but I think you would be money ahead to just scrap the board and buy a new KT-133A based board and a Socket A Thunderbird or Duron. Also the Slot A thunderbirds max out at 800 MHz so you have a pretty limited amount of upgrading you can do.

Eric

 

[Richardito]

If you have aout $200 to spent, get an unlocked Socket A Duron and a new KT133 mobo. If you have more $ get a Socket A T-Bird and a KT133a mobo. With a cheap Gold Finger Device you could easily get your computer running @750MHz or higher for about $20-40. My brother has a Slot A 750MHz and he used a GFD to get 950MHz. With some more experimenting (and maybe soldering the resistor kit) I'm sure he can squeeze over 1GHz out of the Slot A. Not bad for a little work.

 

[Rand]

Slot A is pretty much dead now, but if you were able to obtain a high clocked Slot A Athlon for a good price you could still get a very nice performance boost.

 

[bonkers325]

pretty much

 

[00aStrOgUy00]

actually slot A goes up to 1GHz...but it costs $280...so it's going to cost less if you just got a socket A motherboard and get a 1GHz socket A cpu

 

[Turkey]

If you're not squeamish about messing with your hardware get a GFD... best $20 upgrade you can make.

 

[Killrose]

It's days are numberd, if they haven't all ready passed. Are'nt Slot A CPU prices higher anyway's?

 

[OneOfTheseDays]

Slot a goes up to 1ghz. If you have a gfd you can push a 900mhz tbird to 1100 mhz easily. So no it's not really dead considering that 1ghz socket a's are pretty much top end. There is still life left, but it's days are numbered.

 

[Anaconda]

yup