Java Cafe / Viva Computers Warning

[nGAGEd55]

nGAGEd55: Yes there are people doing it. How many of it is true I wouldn't know, but because there are some websites showing you which pins to join suggests that there are some basis for these claims. Besides, AMD would even maintain that the world is flat if it was of some value to them so don't believe everything that they are telling you about locked cpus.

It isn't that i'm believing everything AMD's telling me, it's just that I haven't heard of anyone actually doing it.

And if there are websites showing you which pins to join, what is there to figure out then?

Athlon 64 3000+
Will try to run it up to 4000+ with watercooling after I figure out the correct "jumper" settings courtesy AMD technical documents.

 

[ShockG]

Exactly!
Prometheus you have still not shown how you plan on turning a 3000+ into a 4000+. Needless to say this would have nothing to do with cooling at all. And you seem to not be getting it. 4000+ has 1MB L2 cache-> far more gates than 512KB parts like Venice, Winnie and Castle.

You're tryin' to pull a fast one on us but that won't do.
And you do know that carbon is proabably the most freely available substance in the world. Which pencil do you know of that doesn't featue any form of carbon? Your quote is rubbish and doesn't disprove anything I said at all.
Give us one link\post or anything to indicate what you suggest is true about unlcoking the A64.

You see, you should go on to other forums and stop tryin' to pull the wool over our eyes here. We were not born yesterday.
I promise you that I've gone through more Athlon CPu's than you've ever seen and during 2001/2002 when 3Dm2K1 competitions were in the early 20K region, I was pushing and researching as much as I could about the Athlon CPUs architecture and any tweaks that were available.

So which sites are these that you are talking about? Could it be eXtremeSystems? DFI-Street, CLubOC, VR-Zone, Guru3D, Anandtech, OC-inside, (yes where they have all the pin out configurations for the AthlonXP multi/fsb)
Please just provide one link to validate your claims.

Oh! and BTW I know about the bridges. AMD started etching out the bridges so you couldn't join them and you needed to fill them up with super glue and then sand the pits, or use a defogger kit. There's nothing you could suggest about the AthlonXP I don't know so lets not even try that. We all have access to the AMD website and the data sheets. Like I told you, Mobile AtlonXP became a hit because it had in essence no default multiplier and anything you wanted to set it at was up to the motherboard.
One of the motherboards that worked with the M-AXP was the DFI LP2 NF2U board. Which I had along with the relevant CPUs.

Dude, try again, you're only makin' yourself look unreliable.
SO to settle this, please link a site or anyone else in the world willing to validate what you're saying about unlocking A64 CPUs?

 

[Prometheus]

It isn't that i'm believing everything AMD's telling me, it's just that I haven't heard of anyone actually doing it.

And if there are websites showing you which pins to join, what is there to figure out then?

Well, I actually posted that before I found any of those sites. There is one really good interactive one, but I'm not so naive as to just pop in a few wires. Before I join anything I want to be sure that I'm not accidentally giving my cpu core a voltage of 3.3V or something like that. You can check it out if you like, but I'm not taking responsibility for anything you do or don't do.
http://www.ocinside.de/html/main_workshop.html

 

[ShockG]

That page is from 2002 and I am well versed in it and most of all, it has nothing to do with Athlon64.

But anyway, believe what you want, you can unlock an A64 or add cache to it if you want. Whatever works best for you, you win a resounding victory in proving you can unlock an A64 while linking to an AtlonXP page that's 4years old. Nice!

 

[BTTB]

Mobile Chips

Oh yes.
Unlocked Mobile Barton Chips.
Got one of those 2.
It is now in the computer case that answers the Fax running at some ridiculous over-clocked speed on one of my NF7-S Rev2.0 boards.
Couldn't be bothered to change the setting to default.
It runs like that 24/7 processing cycles and collecting dust waiting for somebody to send me a fax.

 

[Prometheus]

That page is from 2002 and I am well versed in it and most of all, it has nothing to do with Athlon64.

But anyway, believe what you want, you can unlock an A64 or add cache to it if you want. Whatever works best for you, you win a resounding victory in proving you can unlock an A64 while linking to an AtlonXP page that's 4years old. Nice!

That url was copied from my address bar after I reached the Athlon 64 page, it defaults to the Athlon XP page if you enter it directly. I found that out just before your post and have now corrected it.

 

[nGAGEd55]

That url was copied from my address bar after I reached the Athlon 64 page, it defaults to the Athlon XP page if you enter it directly. I found that out just before your post and have now corrected it.

All I see is mod on how to change the Vcore voltage, nothing about the multiplier, maybe you could tell me where exactly on that page you see the mod to unlock the multiplier? I seriously cant find it on that page.

 

[ShockG]

Yes prometheus, but where is the multiplier unlocking page. You linked to vcore mods which have almost ZERO value as 99% of S939 boards have Vcore adjustments.

Anyway lets just leave it. You may have mistaken the Vcore guide for a multiplier guide...

 

[supersunbird]

ShockG knows his stuff.

 

[Epimetheus]

ShockG knows his stuff.

Well, he would have more easily convinced me of that if he didn't make comments like this:

Add to which with AthlonXp no one was using pencils, but copper wire or conductive paint.

when I know for a fact that people were using pencils. One guide was targeting specifically the Athlon XP and even showed you how to turn your processor into a mobile one so that you can adjust the multiplier freely. But then I don't expect anyone to believe that as there is no way to link to paper.

This whole thing actually started because of a comment I made over which boards are better for overclocking. ShockG somehow took offence to that and asked rather sarcastically: "And I suppose you are a real overclocker right?", to which I then responded. Then came this even more sarcastic post which assumes I know absolutely nothing about cpus after I politely responded to someone's question. Then I was really offended and started to finally throw some real sarcasm back.

If he's an overclocker then why not just say so and if not then why not just say so too and move on. But instead we get comments that it's impossible to change the multiplier because it's "locked" without an explanation of why he thinks it's impossible. If the whole world had that reasoning we would still be living in the dark ages. Thankfully there are people who don't listed to that garbage and because of that they are actually doing that which was impossible to do at first.

If you still think it's impossible to change multipliers on an Athlon64 then just take a look at that original overclockable Athlon on which the multipliers was thought to be unchangable... until someone decided that they WERE changable. Maybe even set it back to it's factory setting as it's impossible to run it on that specs according to AMD's initial remarks regarding overclocking.

And btw I never said anything about changing my cpu to the exact specifications of a 4000+ since I know that would be impossible even for AMD. I was speaking performance wise. If the frequency of the processor was upped from 1800MHz to 2700MHz - that is 300MHz over that of the 4000+ to allow for architectural changes - it should be running near or at the same performance level of the 4000+. And if anyone wants to say that it's not possible to do that, please provide reasons for your comment like when you actually tried it out, because if you haven't tried it then you can't convince anyone that it's impossible.

Things always looks clearer in hindsight.

 

[Prometheus]

All I see is mod on how to change the Vcore voltage, nothing about the multiplier, maybe you could tell me where exactly on that page you see the mod to unlock the multiplier? I seriously cant find it on that page.

Yes, sorry about that. With all ShockG's subversions I actually didn't check what it was really for. But if you look further you will see that it is relatively new. Quote from the website:

The interactive AMD Socket 939 Pinmod guide (and Socket 754) will get still some updates in the future and I won't give up to find solutions for the CPU multiplicator increasement.

I have no doubt that there will be a guide for changing the multiplier somewhere in the near future. But then again, according to some people we shouldn't even try even though if everyone always stuck to what is known we would still be unable to copy DVDs which are copy-protected and which cannot be copied as we were told. And before anyone tells me that they in fact cannot be copied, just know that I actually know people who are copying them.

 

[Beta]

This brings up an interesting point,there seem to be a few of ppl giving advice on this forum who dont actually know what they are talking about,just to make a post?(Self Appointed Advice Givers)
I would not wanna be on the receiving end of some of the "advice" given out here.

 

[me]

It's ironic that the Biostar 6100-939 which this thread was originally about, is actually a better overclocking board than the ASUS I replaced it with.

In fact the Biostar looked really promising. The BIOS is packed with features and I found all kinds of praise for it (more than for equivalent big brand boards). Many people have got a lot of joy from it. Seems to break the you-get-what-you-pay-for rule. It was definately better value for money than the Athlon 64 3000+ I put in it, with its retarded 9x multiplier.

But, that doesn't change the fact that they messed up on a whole batch. I think it speaks volumes for the kind of people who generally buy budget "no-name" boards that Java Cafe and DataMine the reseller have not had any returns of a board with a _broken NIC_. It wasn't just mine.

I'll be avoiding nVidia chipsets from now on. Ostensibly great value for money but flawed by the fact that nVidia just doesn't have enough experience in mobos. Take their buggy IDE drivers for example...

 

[ShockG]

See this is exactly what I mean.
Prometheus and his pseudo-name assumed that there's such a thing as a "real overclocker."
Who decides who's a real overclocker and who isn't?
Any 'real' overclocker was once a N00b and you don't decide you're a real overclocker, you let youre results speak for themselves.
So what results do you have to suggest you're a real overclcker and anyone who would buy a Biostar board isn't?

Being an overclocker is not being part of a guild, you as the individual decide if you're an overclocker or not.
Changing the clock speed from 1800MHz to 2700MHz on an A63 3000+ does not require any technical documentation at all. It's a matter of changing your HT speed from 200 to 300 and that's all.

And no, its not that I believe that things that are difficult are impossible forever. It's like hoping to change a 7800GT into a 7800GTX, in theory its possible but it'll be impossible for anyone who does't have access to labs and interllectual property that nvidia owns.
As far as the overclocker\general consumer is concerened it may as well be impossible.

Ngaged55 asked you, that don't you think the mods would have been found by now? And he's right. The A64 is from 2003 a good 2-3years old now.
The pin mod guid to AXP was up within the month of release of the XP.
The XP had less than half the pinouts of the 939 socket A64, how you find it relevant to draw parallels between these is beyond me.

Your assumption that all you needed to mod an AthlonXP was a pencil was incorrect. You would get nowhere with a pencil, but like I said earlier, you'd need super glue\ a defogger kit etc...
==============================================
me:
nVidia doesn't make motherboards. They make chipsets and that's that. Nvidia is a fabless company and all their chipsets either come from UMC/TSMC or IBM.
Nvidia does have exeperience in making motherboard chipsets. They awere the first to allow dual channel memory function on the AthlonXP through the nForce chipset, infct the oly ones because VIA promised but failed to deliver. KT600 was the same as KT400 just with official 400MHz FSB support, but no dual channel and no locked AGP/PCI clk.
VIA and SiS chipsets are nowhere near the quality or functionality of the nvidia chipsets The only valuable competitor are the ATi chipsets like the radeon 32000 chipset or Xpress200.

By avaoiding nvidia chipsets, you'll almost be making sure yoll never have a useful A64 platform from now on in, since ULI is now part of nVidia your only option wil be ATi and that will put you out of SLi (no biggie I suppose)

Partly why the AXp/A64 platforms were succesful was because the nforce chipsets allowed the platforms to excell past their intel equivelants. AMD chipsets for their own CPUs aren't so great. AMD 761 for example
nVidia was the first chipset manufacturer to put high quality DolbY Digital Live! support on a motherboard with the Soundstorm APU. Matched with the ALC650 the configuration was better than the SB Live! and Audigy! of the time. (not to be confused with the less than stellar ALC655 6.1 Codec which featured on many integrated boards)

nVidia has always had a very close relationship with AMD, proablby closeer than any other relationship they have with any other IHV. Partly because nV CEO is a former senior AMD engineer. nV only supplies the chipset, what Asus/Biostar/WinFoxx or Abit do with the chipset is up to them.
I can easily get an HT speed of 400+ on my SLI-D board/ while on the ECS boards (including the extreme) you'll find it hard to hit 250.
Matched with a 9X multiplier of the 3000+, you'll hit a maximum 2.25Hz which is okay I suppose but could be better. With the DFI you are good for over 3.6GHz (you'll need ice or change for that I suppose), both using the nVidia nForce4 Ultra/SLI chipset.

 

[me]

The comment about nVidia is to be taken separately from the mobo manufacturer issue, although they are related. I mentioned the IDE driver problem, which is specifically nVidia. I've had problems with other aspects of their chipsets in the past.

I just don't think nVidia has the same ability or interest in maintaining high standards for their mobo chipsets, as, say, VIA. They shouldn't be spreading their business out too wide -- territory of the jack of all trades, master of none.

I see nVidia as supplying cheap chipsets to match cheap CPUs to make great "enthusiast" machines. But they just don't strike me as being terribly robust or of fantastic quality. Sort of perpetual beta. I had to track down patches and driver updates just to make the thing work properly.

I like what they do, but I personally don't want to spend another weekend messing about just to get basic features to work.

 

[me]

BTW, which bus is that that you put up to 400MHz?

 

[Prometheus]

See this is exactly what I mean.
Prometheus and his pseudo-name assumed that there's such a thing as a "real overclocker."
Who decides who's a real overclocker and who isn't?
Any 'real' overclocker was once a N00b and you don't decide you're a real overclocker, you let youre results speak for themselves.
So what results do you have to suggest you're a real overclcker and anyone who would buy a Biostar board isn't?

Ah, well, this is exactly where we got our signals crossed. Maybe because you assume that I said that anyone who buys boards like Biostar (you probably have one of those) are not overclockers when I in fact said nothing of the kind. My original statement was that you don't need boards with all those fancy names like i-Cool, CIA and CIA2, EasyTune, MIB and MIB2, and NOS. These are all marketed at the casual pc user who doesn't know the first thing about overclocking, but want to cash in on the experience. The Biostar boards which I didn't even mention btw has some really useful features in fact, but in order for them to be effective you have to know how to use them. I actually have an ASUS board because I was running out of time to get a board and now I hate the bloody thing because it doesn't give me the settings I want to have.

Being an overclocker is not being part of a guild, you as the individual decide if you're an overclocker or not.
Changing the clock speed from 1800MHz to 2700MHz on an A63 3000+ does not require any technical documentation at all. It's a matter of changing your HT speed from 200 to 300 and that's all.

Yes, I know I can do that, but not until I have the right cooling. I would however prefer to change the multiplier instead of the whole fsb.

The A64 is from 2003 a good 2-3years old now.
The pin mod guid to AXP was up within the month of release of the XP.
The XP had less than half the pinouts of the 939 socket A64, how you find it relevant to draw parallels between these is beyond me.

If the XP has less than half the pins then certainly it would be easier to mod than the A64. The more pins there are the more combinations there are. So for 4 pins the number of different combinations for joining 2 pins is 6, for 8 pins it's 28, with the Athlon XP it's 106491 for its 462 pins and for 939 it's 440391. It takes exponentially longer everytime the number of pins doubles. I never drew any direct comparison between the two. I said that all the Athlons are locked and you have to manually unlock them unless you have one of those boards which took care of the pin joining for you. The earlier Athlons were just easier to unlock, but they were still locked because my Duron didn't want to run on a different multiplier without unlocking it.

Your assumption that all you needed to mod an AthlonXP was a pencil was incorrect. You would get nowhere with a pencil, but like I said earlier, you'd need super glue\ a defogger kit etc...

One of your own posts said that only the later Athlon XPs were made so that you could no longer just join bridges. You automatically assumed that I was talking about the latest Athlon XPs when I was referring to the earlier ones. And yes, you can join the bridges on them (the earlier ones I mean) by using only a pencil. I have the guide for heavens sake. Do you want to tell me that my own eyes have been lying to me over and over?

You seem to misread people's posts which then leads to unnecessary arguments when instead we could be coming up with solutions. And just fyi I have been overclocking cpus since the 386's and 486's which I ran at 150% of their rated speed if I remember correctly without any problems and with no cooling before overclocking them was even mentioned in any magazines I saw so I think I have earned the right to call myself a real overclocker despite what you may think. Just because I can't afford to get every cpu there is doesn't make me a noob as you seem to think.

Maybe you should do as someone once suggested to me and download the newest reading comprehension skills. And if you think that was unfair then just know that we have now argued for over two pages because of a misinterpreted post over which motherboards are better for overclockers when we could have been 2 days nearer to a solution. I can actually take criticism when people know what they are criticising.

Off topic:
Has anyone gone through that site I linked to? Some really remarkable stuff there. Especially this page. Hope I got the link right this time.

 

[ShockG]

Wow. I'm thinkin' you're the only one who has had problems with nvidia's ide driver. Out of all the nf4 motherboards I've had (more than 12) I've never had a problem with an IDE driver at all.

nVidia is not a jack of all trades. Chipset manufacturing is very important to them and hence they bought ULI.

In fact nvidia has more money to spend on chipset R&D than VIA has. Simply because without NForce chipsets AMD would not be what it is today and without an SLI chipset they could not sell or market their "Power of 3" camapgin. "SLI, HDR, DX9."

Ask anyone anywhere today, there is no beter chipset you can get your hands on right now that can match the nforce4 chipsets. (maybe radeon 3200X)

I see nVidia as supplying cheap chipsets to match cheap CPUs to make great "enthusiast" machines. But they just don't strike me as being terribly robust or of fantastic quality. Sort of perpetual beta. I had to track down patches and driver updates just to make the thing work properly.

Here is what you may not know about Nvidia.
Nvidia provide the graphics power for many hollywood studios. Day after Tomorrow had all pre-visuals rendered on nvidia QuadroFX boards. Guess what was the underlying structure? nForce Professional.

Avid who by far provide more NLE systems than anyone else in hollywood, use Quadro in SLI and what chipset is that? nForcePro obviously alot of video is done on Macs, but even on a Mac you get QuadroDDL.

As for cheap CPU's? AMD cheap CPUs? Don't think so.
Madagasscar the movie was rendered on AMD Opteron machines, on servers built By HP, who happen to be number one server builder hand down.

There's nothing cheap about AMD because be it Operon Vs Xeon, X2 vs P4D, A64 vs P4E, AMD wins without much question.

But back to nvidia, they easily trounce anything VIA has to offer without even batting an eye. Like I told you, the relationship between nvidia and AMD was forged long before nVidia even started in the mid 90s.
VIA makes alot of OEM, simple and cheap chipsets, but even there ULI had them beat in quality, but not volume shifted. The only reason nVidia bought ULI was to get into that market, because their nForceIGP solutions were still too expensive.

AMD owes so much to nvidia in getting the Athlon name to where it is, it's not funny. I would even argue that nvidia makes chipsets for the intel platform that almost match intels own in house chipsets.

VIA K880 and other 939 socket chipsets are so bad that despite the controller being internal on the cpu. On those chipsets the performance is dismal at best.

VIA has more assets than nVidia, but their research team and R&D is nowhere near the size or quality of what nvidia or ATi have.
In the last 10 years VIA has made bad purchase after bad descision. They bought S3® and turned it into Sonic Blue which has dissapeared into thin air, then they bought XGI another no show with their Volari series graphics cards. Then they bought Cyrix, another has been in the CPU market.
Out of all these purchases, VIA is worse of now than they've ever been before.
Now lets look at thw history of all these companies and their products quickly.

Cyrix
======
Died a nasty death in the cpu clone wars along with NextGen. At the time they made x586 Pentium clones just like AMD's K6.
Ezra, Nehemiah, etc... All their C3 CPU's were so bad it was as if Cyrix was pouring money down the sewers. In the end
Cyrix C3 =DEAD!

S3
========
Produce S3 Virge =Crushed by 3Dfx Voodoo
S3 Trio3D =Crushed by Rendtion\3Dfx Voodoo
S3 Savage3D = Crushed horibly by everything else out there including Riva128
S3 Savage4 = Destroyed by TNT\Voodoo2\Banshee*\Matrox G400\ATI Rage Furrry
S3 Delta series = Horrible onboard stuff, destroyed by Intel's VGA chipsets like on the real 3D starfighter (Intel815), 915G/945/950

S3 Gamma Chrome = Has been, that never was. Slower than 2003's FX and radeon series cards. Broken drivers and only partial shader model 2..0 support.

S3 S3TC = Licensed and now fully owned by Microsoft as DXT1. Replaced by the other compresseion schemes DXT3~DXT5

Trident/XGI
===========
Never did anything usefull from 1994 onwards.
XGi Volari Duo=Worse than GeForceFX 5700 despite that it came aftewards

VIA
==========
VIA Apollo Pro 133/133a = Intel 440LX\440BX were much better hands down.
Via KT133x =No comment
VIA KT266\KM266 = beaten sideways by nvidia's first motherboard chipset venture. nforce1

VIA KT400\a\KM400 = Beaten by nforce2 sideways and upwards again.
It featured no locked PCI/AGP bus so increasing fsb increased PCI bus and locked the system

VIA KT600 =beaten royally by nforce2. No need to proclaim how Abit NF7-S was acclaimed by enthusiasts and general users alike. Despite suffering from capps that would pop on overclocking (fixed by replacement with Rubycon caps in Rev2.0) nost didn't care about the VIA Kt600.
No Dual Chanel support once again.

A64 chipsets = Bah!

So VIA have not done anything right for years on end. It's only through their OEM market that they stay alive. Maybe it's not so much a failure to get good engineers, but failure to make wise business choices. Either way, VIA is a no show and hasn't been for years now. Hrdly even woth mentioning in the same post as nForce or Radeon Xpress or intel chipsets for that matter.

Their competition is SiS and that's not hard to beat.
================================

Bus? the Barton AthlonXP's operated on 400MHz bus including the Barton AXP 3200+ (11x200) and the late and very short lived AXP T-BredB 3000 (10.5x200)

 

[pip]

Can we have intermission so I can go buy more popcorn and slush please?

 

[mccrack]

Man, between ShockG & Prometheus you must be up for the the longest post awards.

Good stuff, good entertainment