Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
This forum is in permanent archive mode. Our new active community can be found here.
Athlon XP2400+ unlocking troubles / weirdness
I recently figured my November-2002 PC (with some changes, most notably the GPU) was getting too old.
So, because I have an Athlon XP2400+ and Athlons have been known to be very overclockable, I figured I'd give that a try. I remembered having to unlock it first, and I found two methods: the "connect two pins"-method and the "connect the L1-bridges"-method.
I decided to go with the L1-approach, where the graphite of a pencil was supposed to be enough to reconnect the bridges. However, the XP2400+ is supposed to have a laser-etched hole in between the L1's to prevent it from being that easy.
Mine didn't.
So I just connected the L1-bridges and put it back in (and I am very sure I did nothing wrong with the thermal paste).
After that, the PC would come on, but the monitor just didn't turn on. I tried using the DVI-Port of my graphics card (with an adapter ^^) instead of the VGA one, but that resulted in the PC giving me the POST-beep-code for "No DRAM detected".
So I started digging around for an old graphics card, found a PCI one, discarded that, found an AGP one and tried that. Same thing. I have yet to put _my_ card in another machine to fully verify my theory, but I think the graphics card is fine.
From what I read, the problem could either have to do something with the "unlocking" or with the Athlon CPUs being extremely touchy when it comes to putting on the heatsink. I have removed and replaced the heat sink before, though, in a much less professional manner without any damage whatsoever.
And, to make matters worse, I just read a forum post suggesting that the 2-pin-approach is just a workaround for older mainboards that couldn't deal with the multipliers being 5-bit instead of 4-bit.
Does anyone have a clue what happened there?
PS: I figured my setup would be useful:
Asus A7V8X Mainboard (a weird OEM edition that doesn't have some of the features, though)
GeForce FX 5900XT GPU (on a card made by Leadtek)
Terratec Aureon 5.1 Fun sound card
Some Arctic Cooling CPU Heatsink (I think Copper Silent S2L or sthg... it has blue LEDs and 3 speeds to pick)
2x256MB of RAM
+ various drives (HDD, DVD, CD-RW, Floppy)
So, because I have an Athlon XP2400+ and Athlons have been known to be very overclockable, I figured I'd give that a try. I remembered having to unlock it first, and I found two methods: the "connect two pins"-method and the "connect the L1-bridges"-method.
I decided to go with the L1-approach, where the graphite of a pencil was supposed to be enough to reconnect the bridges. However, the XP2400+ is supposed to have a laser-etched hole in between the L1's to prevent it from being that easy.
Mine didn't.
So I just connected the L1-bridges and put it back in (and I am very sure I did nothing wrong with the thermal paste).
After that, the PC would come on, but the monitor just didn't turn on. I tried using the DVI-Port of my graphics card (with an adapter ^^) instead of the VGA one, but that resulted in the PC giving me the POST-beep-code for "No DRAM detected".
So I started digging around for an old graphics card, found a PCI one, discarded that, found an AGP one and tried that. Same thing. I have yet to put _my_ card in another machine to fully verify my theory, but I think the graphics card is fine.
From what I read, the problem could either have to do something with the "unlocking" or with the Athlon CPUs being extremely touchy when it comes to putting on the heatsink. I have removed and replaced the heat sink before, though, in a much less professional manner without any damage whatsoever.
And, to make matters worse, I just read a forum post suggesting that the 2-pin-approach is just a workaround for older mainboards that couldn't deal with the multipliers being 5-bit instead of 4-bit.
Does anyone have a clue what happened there?
PS: I figured my setup would be useful:
Asus A7V8X Mainboard (a weird OEM edition that doesn't have some of the features, though)
GeForce FX 5900XT GPU (on a card made by Leadtek)
Terratec Aureon 5.1 Fun sound card
Some Arctic Cooling CPU Heatsink (I think Copper Silent S2L or sthg... it has blue LEDs and 3 speeds to pick)
2x256MB of RAM
+ various drives (HDD, DVD, CD-RW, Floppy)
Comments
The only thing I did was make 4 strokes with a pencil, and honestly, I just wanted to know if I really do have to take off the heat sink again and all that and erase those lines or if it's something else, OR if my CPU is 100% guaranteed toast and I don't even need to try.