Some serious memories flooding back after reading this comment!

Pencils were awesome!

Yeah, I bought Duron 600 in september 2000 and it overclocked like crazy. With so-called pencil mod to unlock multiplier, it was running rock solid at 933 MHz. Unbeatable for that price, of course.

I never had luck with these mods.

I have one that doesn't boot It has the Athlon 2800+xp I'll try with a different psu

AH the pencil! What a high tech tool it is. Or should I say, was. People just wouldn't believe that you could mod a graphic card by drawing lines between those funny bits on PCBs. Man, was I both poor and desperate. And certainly not a techie. If it showed you where to draw the line I didn't care how it worked, or what the bit (component) did. I drew the line and prayed it worked. Most the times it didn't so I was sceptical until it worked on a 9600XT I seem to remember (not very well I hasten to add). All those little switches. All before specsavers, sadly.

I remember that, from a long time ago ahah. Good memories

I also upgraded from a K6/2 400 to a Duron 750mhz with 256mn of SDRAM and Abit motherboard in late 2000 and because of the limited funds a geforce 2 mx400! I spent countless nights on that system!The system worked just fine until a couple of years ago when a power failure took out the PSU, the motherboard and the CPU!

It's a shame. Those were good machines. Got a socket 370 platform rocking even today. But there is just a huge gap up to my next rig. Something from the Athlon XP lineup would fill it perfectly.

At that time not only Duron had the capability to compete with, and defeate Celeron, but also it was able to fight with Pentium III, let alone the higher-priced Athlon CPU, Intel even couldn't take back the competition with Pentium 4 later on.

@@ND22M geforce 2 MX400 wasnt out in 2000. You probably missed it by year, it was in 2001.

@@ching-chenhuang8119 In 2000 the Duron 650 was basically performing as well as a Pentium 3 EB and yet it was even cheaper than the outdated Mendocino Celeron.

I took a similar path. One didn't have much money back then so Duron was an excellent choice. Age 16 and bought myself Duron 600 as my first own computer, clocked it to 900Mhz by drawing some connections with a pencil between some L-bridges to unlock the multiplier. Few years later I went for the Duron 1800 Applebread(?).

Yeah I got a sempron 1.6ghz was multi locked but I still did the cache mod for full athlon L2 an it clocked like mad got 2.8ghz 24/7 an was basically a athlon xp Barton core

Thank you!

from any point of view in my opinion intel is overpriced in all cpu's comparing to what ryzen offer for the price with the first zen's even more now with the zen+

And now they have returned, AMD is kicking Intel’s ass again 😅😅

oh you mean like now? in 2020?

@Cuzeg Spiked amd returned

Intel has failed AMD back then... goes to Socket 370 flashbacks.

AMD Duron 64 would of been good

Was fairly easy methods to mount it if you bent the mounting bracket lightly so it wasn't that stiff, as it still made contact with the core there isnt much pressure needed really.

oh god i hated those. i remember alot of pentium 3 era coolers were as bad or worse. It was also the duron or athlon coolers that were the worst though.

yea but taking it off was the hard part

They were annoying, but not near as bad as the P4 crappy joke of mounting system. imho the socket 939 to the current AM4 have been the best cooler mounting systems, intel post slot 1 have had such a convoluted setup though the latest haven't been too bad but still not as good or easy as the AMD.

This is why I bought a CPU shim with my Athlons starting with the XP 1800+ and those things made mounting so much easier.

Thanks!

Just reminded me that back then Tom's Hardware made a video on the comparison of CPU overheat protection between Pentium3/4 and Socket Athlon processors, Athlon cpu actully got burnt because of no overheat protection.

It's happening.

I think having the celeron there makes it more fair in terms of marketting etc (even though this too is a great video of course).

You're doing excellent work, Phil. Really building up a library of very valuable information about these old systems and this era of PC tech.

But then swap the socket 370 platform for either a 440BX or i815 chipset. The VIA boards on Intel were always between unstable and slow. And maybe some nForce board for the Socket A tests.

I'd like to see maybe the budget Socket A cpu's compete too, maybe a Sempron 2400+ so we can compare the performance with their bigger brothers in the series

That's good. Socket A needs massive fans. :P

the duron didnt need the extra 4 pin conector, that was a P4 thing

I have both cpus...BTW, which is faster: the Duron 1800, or the Sempron 2500+ (462)?

@@ThiagoPerroni Clearly the sempron. Same clockspeed and has 4x the cache. ALso a higher busspeed I fact I like them more then the Althlons xps.

@@Trancelistic Thanks man, But I think that 2500+ runs at 1750 mhz. Im looking for an AXP 3000+ but is so rare here, in Brazil.

@@ThiagoPerroni To bad to hear:( I still got a win 98se pc, with the thunderbird 1400 and another pc with the barton 3200+. Win xp pc has the AMD x 2 6400+. Yeah... I liked AMD :P (still do)

I don't like to overclock these old parts.

PS here found something from the archive that complements and confirms your benchmarks www.tweakpc.de/hardware/tests/cpu/duron_bench1.htm

Someone noticed :) It came this way, but will get a new cooler.

No I haven't, I tend not to OC retro / old parts, they are so cheap you can just buy the top or second best model for little money.

Well that's what these videos are for :D There are over 400, many build guides, I'm sure you can find something useful.

Same

There will be videos in the future to look into this!

snake oil? they didn't work all that well. The problem was that the tolerances were off because the die thickness wasn't perfectly consistent and neither was the thickness of the spacers, assuming they weren't warped. So you got cases where the cooler couldn't make good contact, with the die because the spacer was warped or too thick causing higher temperatures than expected and you got cases where the spacer was too thin and the die was at risk of chipping anyway.

They were called shims, and they served no bloody purpose. They didn't prevent the die from being damaged when hamfistedly installing a heatsink and they were a major cause of overheating.

I'd test both and find out! Too many variables otherwise.

had a cpu with a broken pin from a friend found a used mobo from recycling and got a couple pins from a fried pentium cpu to fix the cpu with the broken pin worked like a charm for 5 years till the mobo died

for more fun try slokets

What's the problem with slotkets?

nothing it's fun to mess with them found in a dumster diving a twin slot 1 had two slockets strapped a couple 370 socket cpu at 500mhz i think its a Mendocino type celeron

Cool! I never find stuff like that!

Very interesting. But yea, I know little about them. I had zero luck with pencil modding. The board has multi options in the BIOS, but it never worked out. I can use mail forwarder, so if you find some good US links please share them :)

Pencil modding only works with early spitfire (duron) and thunderbird (athlon) CPUs. Later Models have some shallow grooves cut between the points to prevent the pencil thing. People used superglue to fill in the grooves to make an even surface with questionable results to enable the pencil thing for a while until that idea was quickly abandoned for conductive paint or lacquer. Doing these mods was a mess and mistakes weren't as easy to fix as the pencil method.

Mobile Athlon 4 is a mobile derivate of the Palomino based Athlon XP which runs at lower clocks and FSB 200, it usually have unlocked multiplier and it should work on desktop mobos as long it supports Palomino based CPUs, you might have to set up the clock on BIOS since it'll probably boot at 600-800 mhz

@@TheRealKoltoroc I remember the grooves and the conductive paint. :))

The bad reputation came from some cheap motherboards that where often sold with them.

Thanks :D

Thanks for the offer with games. For me it's about time. It has to go fast basically. Let's say I want to put 3 gameplay into a video, if I don't know the game, have to look for it, then it doesn't work, or needs a crack or patch... You get what I mean :D I really like demos as they are like back in the day, no GOG mods or CD copy protections. If a game is on GOG I use that though, it works most of the time. So that's my main issue. What do you think?

I absolutely agree/understand.The demo is better than a whole game. Luckily I also keep the CDs from PC magazines of the time. You get a good taste of the game which is great for short films or benchmarking a pc build. I have kept every single CD/DVD from PC magazines from around 2002 till 2010 which I bought. Lol. Thats a LOT of demos and media of those great times. So demos are much more use to you than the whole game. I have thousands so if you want a particular one from after 2002 let me know. I have some older ones too, Commanche 3, Armoured fist 2 and 3, sudden strike 1 and 2, , Jedi Knights, Will Rock, Devastation,Freelancer,raven shield,Laser Squad Nemesis,Echelon Wind Warriors, Chaser, Mistmare, Enigma Rising tide, Star Trek Elite, and many many more. All Demos, All on CD (not DVD) and all in good condition. So just ask and I will see if I got it and can send it, (to you only, of course.)by Zip File. Keep up the very good work.

Awesome, thank you :D This can also work the other way. If there is something you want to see in a video, send me a link, most demos can be found online on legit sites, and maybe some brief instrucstions. For example whenever I tried a flight sim, I have no clue what I'm doing :D This is one reason I like driving and FPS games so much, you can just play them without reading instructions.

Lol I remember when that pencil trick was discovered, I could barely believe it. It made me buy a cheap Duron, a pencil, and a Thermoengine V60-4210 cooler with a ridiculously loud Delta fan. I have very fond memories of overclocking that system.

@@sl9sl9 great times for sure! Cheers

Keep in mind that I'm using a newer KT600 chipset board as well as DDR memory. That likely helps out the Duron a little bit. Yes you could unlock cores on certain cards, I remember that well :) But it wasn't the 9600, I think it was the 9500 to 9700.

is it? i had 1.5g at the time.. (a buddies father worked at a data center and they had extra ram they sold us at cost, 512g sticks.. sadly my board only had 3 slots... oh and i had that ram since my last p3 build before moving to a duron then athelon/xp and such... i loved unlocking applebred durons and testing them to hell to be sure they were really reliable unlocked to full axp...) imho, testing with what at the time would have been called insane by many, isnt in any way a bad thing.. some of us, even those who were far from rich... and got most of our stuff trading, 2nd hand and doing computer work for people... may have had. he...im using a x58/1366 xeon x5675@4.45-4.7*ghz with 48gb of ddr3 2133@1780mhz 9-10-10-26, cr1, that i moved to from an AM3+ system that for many many years, had 32gb (that i added a matching 16gb kit to when moving to this after a motherboard fire...), it worked great, took work to get 32gb at 2133 working on am3+. but once i figured out the trick with my crosshair v-z and sabertooth boards, it was cake to get it working for friends who grabbed the same or similar ram kits... despite being told it was impossible... over a dozen systems using fx 8 core chips, running 32gb at 2133-2400mhz... one we got a 2600 kit working at rated speeds after a bit more tweaking beyond what was needed for 2133-2400... that is my buddies 8370e(lower power draw ver), that hes got at 5.1ghz 24/7 , and has had for years now... on a gigabyte 990fx ud9 board(build in water cooling for the chipset/vrm/etc... ) hes holding out till he can get a 5600 or better...hoping they make a 5600g or 5700g thats available on the open market, the added gpu would allow somebody to run non-primary monitors off the motherboard and their primary/gaming screen off the gaming card.... avoiding any weird issues with playing video/youtube/etc on side screens as you game..(alot of us do this often, even more so in titles with cue/que systems or where you are just running around waiting for people to get online... anyway, 2gb isnt insane... if you could get deals on tray ram, you could get 1.5-2gb pretty affordably even back then(depends if you had a 4 slot board 2 could be had affordably, 3 slot.. well. 3-4gb could be had but the cost was a bit... painful during the time the systems were relevant. before socket A went EOL itself, i was running 4gb in a board that had 4 slots, an SiS chipset, and if i remember correctly, that was around the time i had a 9600 256m that could be flashed to pro and even XT bios due to the ram used being as good/better then xt offerings, the only real dif..the cooler the 9600 came with was passive and quite small.... the pro and xt had active cooling... i added a copper vantec chipset cooler and ram sinks... then got a deal on a 9500 that could be unlocked to 9700pro via softmod, and that successfully tested out at 9800pro clocks...(infact, i flashed a bios that was 9700pro, then a bios recommended on tpu by a few people for the card with the ram mine had.. it detected as a 9800pro with a mild oc from then on... and works to this day.... a buddy has that whole system still as his period pc for that era, he actually helped me upgrade my main rig alot when i agreed to sell/trade him my old backup system... later he admitted he had always wanted my system... it was just a really nice system for the day, and he got my chip collection, several duron/semperon/ath/axp /amp chips i use to swap around when i felt like benching and overclocking and, as backup chips... he also got the 6 socket A shims i had left... that was when i got to move up from a socket 754 axp, to a dual core am2 system, he took us all down to frys and got me a board combo, that came with a dual core, and an actually decent board(unlocked bios were on multi forums, that brought all oc features to open accessibility. Even some that normally didnt work if exposed on most boards..because they functioned on that board...truly a nice board... anyway, he ended up giving me the combo he got (it was 1 per person), and, i didnt realize it, but, he had bought ram kits for both boards... ended up giving me both sets.. with "insane" ram for the day, (more then i would have had in 1 system for at least a few more years), then, the dude went truly overboard and got me an hdd for each, as well as 2 videocards... again i didnt know what his idea was till we got back up to our area, and dropped the other friends we took with us off.... and he didnt take me home but to his place, unloaded everything... his wife was there... (gf at the time but... she lived with his family and, everybody said, they would endup togather long term.. they just... are eachothers missing pieces.... anyway, she helped him unpack the stuff from bags, then... smiled and told him to get on with it... and he told me the stack of shit was all mine, and thanks for helping him out... oh and could he have my 754 boards(i had 2) and chips( i had 3, one was a laptop chip, that was stupid rare, more so on desktop, clocked really nice, and ran cooler then previous models, they never officially released them for desktop...but the chaintech board i had at the time had bios with support for them baked in... and... omg... that was a fun setup... ) so...for an old system that was overkill for its day, i moved to something that was lower-middle of the road, that with a chip somebody gifted me, that he had thanks to being a tester for amd, (and amd gave him permission to give the chip to me, as they didnt want that stuff back like they had some other stuff, it was nothing secrete but, just...something they didnt bother releasing on that socket..(the same cores im told actually made it into early am2 chips just with dual core ram support that the 754 ver lacked... ) i got 2 setups that, with OC... actually were pretty high end.. i for the life of me cannot remember what videocards he had grabbed with the help of an employee as the rest of us looked around and grabbed what we could afford.. when he sad he would cover my board i had ended up grabbing a few other items, but when they gave me all that.... i was just floored... in the end, i also had to help him build systems for both of them, because, the deal was, they went back down to frys after shift changes(we went in the am, he and her went 2hrs before closing), and got 3 more combos(his father went along, but made my buddy drive..he cannot deal with traffic, he becomes donald duck...), his father build his own system, took him several days of slow and steady, but, his main issue was, the last time he build a pc, it wasa 386 and... this was quite different... but he wanted to do it solo so.. nobody botherd him...(ok...when he went to get tacobell for everybody, i did get his drive cables and such conntected up, and the front panel plugged in properly... later that night he was up and running, and wanting us to install some games for him... my buddy thew him a thick arse binder of burned and legit disks and told him to install whatever he wanted... his father spent the next week playing a bunch of games including a few that were updated versions of what he played on the very first PC they owned, an Apple IIe, some quite new and demanding...he even read the guides and threads we linked him when he wanted to try overclocking...(the sob got a golden sample, at stock volts it would get near the max oc people tended to get...and with a bump..around 200 past that...without needing to be water cooled...we kept threatening to swap chips with him..years later he gave a friend of ours the system, when the guys mother went off her nut and destroyed most of the families stuff, punched a cop, then was found preaching out of a copy of some old classic novel, like it was a bible.. (off her fuckin nut), turned out, she had gone off her meds and worse yet, started taking stuff that lead to a full on manic episode that the doctors said was borderline full psychotic break... she spent years in a mental health facility.... but anyway...even then due to how overclockable the cpu was... he was still mid-high in most games at decent res... me... i ended up selling my core parts to somebody we knew...not really a friend...just...a guy who sort of latched onto our group...but nobody was sure how or why (to this bloody day, even he cant rememeber how he ended up joining our group, despite being so un-suited to our geeky ways... he was a genuine jock, and meat head..mostly due to his fathers influence and shit his father would say when he was growing up... since....well his wife, a friend of ours, who originally fucking loathed him, actually broke his dads programming and.. he started to think, learn, reason... and ended up, telling his father off one night...in front of all of us, in such an eloquent and thoughtful way, that... it genuinely blew my mind... hearing him so... just..."silent bob speech" from jay kinda thing... anyway.... overkill or go home.... specially with retro builds ...

Not as well as these things overclock. I think 1-2GBs on a machine that can overclock well over 1GHz isn't too crazy now that the stuff is cheap. My 1.7GHz Willamette P4 system eventually had 2GB of RDRAM in it as well as an AGP GeForce 6600 GT. It had 32 bit Windows 7 on it by the end of its life and it ran acceptably well.

only RD ram :)

Not sure, like with the modern Socket A board, I usually skip these "intermediate" stuff. Mostly because they are rare and expensive.

socket 478 865 chipsets are basically worthless, these are found in dimension 1100s that flooded the market. I was able to stuff a Prescott p4 (3 ghz) in one of these with hyper threading on.

Best. But i815 is not that bad either. Not as fast, but native support for 133+ FSB. Only 512 MB RAM though, but for a 9x retro machine that is actually quite alot.

@@HappyBeezerStudios I was on 512 MB RAM till mid 2006, and never had a problem. 256 mb is all you need for win98 later games.