overclocking of tbird/duron

[khold]

I am thinking about getting a duron and overclocking it and I was surprised to read that all you need to do is take a regular pencil and "scribble" at the right places on the processor to unlock the multiplier of it. What confuses me is that in June or July when the Duron and Thunderbird overclocking information was coming out and there was articles on it (at toms hardware and here) I remember they mentioned stuff about soldering and disconnecting traces using an exacto knife. Well if all you really need is a pencil, then what was all that stuff about?

 

[fitzhue]

I recall when the slot a athlons came out there was an article on toms hardware that had to do with soldering part of the processor in order to unlock it. This doesn't pertain to the new tbird and duron processors because they are much different. One difference obviously being the classic athlons were slot a and the new athlons and durons are socket a.

 

[khold]

The article I saw at Tom's was about the Duron and Tbird actually, but I am too lazy to look up the URL for it now. However the ones that Anand did are right here:


http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1282
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1277

Some of the stuff they talk about in those articles confuses me because I know nothing about soldering and all that stuff, but if you look at them you can see what I am talking about.

 

[bolomite]

The L1 bridges on the Duron/Thunderbird are so tiny, you're better off using a conductive pen or graphite pencil. If you do it carefully enough, you should never have to reapply.

 

[khold]

Now that I have re-read those articles again I think all that soldering is to add the ability to change the multiplier on the duron/tbird after it is unlocked if your motherboard doesn't have that ability built into it.