Since the AMD Athlon 64 CPU's came out, it seems as if Socket A was forgotten. There are a ton of factors that make the Athlon64 a great CPU, but the enthusiast cannot yet forget Socket A. Recently, DFI had released their Infinity revB motherboard for Socket A, and now overclockers are hitting 240-260 MHz FSB stable, on average. Over at XtremeSystems, there are several users over 270MHz FSB, and one person who has even hit 291MHz FSB!! Not only is that good news for DFI users, but there's some good news for Abit NF7 owners. Just recently, BIOS modder "TicTac" has fixed the 10/10.5 multiplier issue with newer BIOS' for the NF7 series. Now, users can run a high FSB speed along with a high CPU speed, thanks to that 10 and 10.5 mulitplier. At these high CPU and FSB speeds, the performance can rival the Athlon64 and Pentium 4's.
I recently encountered a thread, where a user had reached 2600MHz with an Athlon XP 2400-M processor over at XS. That is an 800MHz overclock over stock speed, pretty rare for AMD XP's. The stock operating frequency of the XP 2400-M is 1.8GHz (133x14), and runs at 1.45V, compared to the normal Bartons, which run at 1.65V. The -M denotes that the processor is a "Mobile" version, intended for use in laptops. Though, intended for laptops, you can use it in your desktop Socket A motherboard that supports the Barton. And because of AMD's PowerNow! power management feature, all mobile processors are multiplier unlocked, to be able to automatically decrease cpu speed when it's unneeded, saving battery life and running cooler. Beacuse of this, the -M are the only Barton cored AMD processors that are multiplier unlocked from the factory now.
Here are the specs off NewEgg's site:
Manufacturer: AMD
Model: AXMH2400FQQ4C
Core: Barton
Operating Frequency: 1.8GHz
FSB: 266MHz
Cache: L1/64K+64K; L2/512K
Voltage: 1.45V
Process: 0.13Micron
Socket: Socket A
Multimedia Instruction: MMX, SSE, 3DNOW!, 3DNOW!+
Packaging: OEM
I had right away purchased the CPU, for $84, when I first heard of the overclockability of the chip. I was taking a risk with this, because you cannot expect to get the same performance as someone else with the same hardware, but I had faith. Three days later, I had received a IQZFA0348TPMW stepping XP 2400-M, same exact stepping as the user at XS who had posted the thread about his CPU hitting a high overclock. I couldn't wait.
Let the overclocking begin
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