Plastic Surgery: Releasing The Athlon XP To Hit 2000+

Socket A Radiates, Continued

After we connected its L1 contacts, an AMD Athlon XP 1900+ has no problems running soundly at 1666 MHz (2000+).

To sum up the past few days: after a host of failed attempts and an infinite number of feedback from you our readers, we managed to prepare a clear, step-by-step guide so that all you ambitious PC users can crack the Athlon XP processor. And that's not all - in addition to pictures and diagrams, we also show benchmark results that demonstrate the jump in the performance of the Athlon XP/MP.

The time needed for the whole shebang is about 30 minutes - at which point, the processor can be overclocked by increasing the multiplier. We dismiss the option of increasing the front-side bus, because a higher clock speed on AGP and PCI buses may plunge some components into instability.

System boot-up with the overclocked Athlon XP: The BIOS displays "Athlon XP 2000+," a performance rating that AMD won't even be offering for another 6 weeks or so.