Athlon 64 multiplier locked?

[minibubba]

THE ATHLON 64 is one mysterious processor. I have been playing with this nice, 64-bit marchitectural delight for last few weeks and am still amazed by it.

What I used to like about Athlon CPUs was that they where almost always unlocked -- at least if you had a decent motherboard -- preferably one from Epox or Abit since they'd fight for your overclocking rights all the time.

Well, the Epox 8HDA+ motherboard based on VIA's K8T800 just got new a bios that even unlocks the multiplier on your CPU, as well as the voltages of your CPU, memory and AGP. The FSB unlocks too, of course. The new bios includes suggested multiplier settings, but if you move these from 10 to 11 on an Athlon 64 chip, nothing happens.

Surprise, surprise: if you set the multiplier to 9, the board actually underclocks your 2000MHz clock CPU to 9 times 215MHz resulting in 1944MHz.

We confirmed this with the Clock Generator application developed by our friend Frank from www.cpuid.com,-the Inquirer
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considering most folks here tend to OC by lowering multi. and increasing FSB it shouldn't be too much of a big deal. But it's a bit peculiar why AMD would lock any increase in the multiplier :shrug:

[Fatguy3]

This is pure speculation, but maybe, just maybe, when they first manufactured the chip, and they were testing it, they went and increased the multiplier and found a stable system, and maybe it went all the way up to 15 or 16x (yeah right :) ) and it was completely stable, so they realized, damn, if we sell this and let hem unlock the multiplier up, they wont buy any of the 1ghz FSB procs we're putting out in 2k4.

On the other end, they might have turned it up to 11.5 and the chip exploded and little gremlins game out of the SATA connector and Half-Life happened at AMD HQ, so they locked it to avoid people destroying their flagship. This could be why we're seeing not great overclocks using FSB on this proc.

As with all new cpu technology, I say give it 6 months til they work the kinks out, and games can use it, then go for broke. Thats why Im desgining a new athlon xp system now :)

[Arsenal11]

So there is no way to tell the CPU's real frequency with that motherboard??

[Soulburner]

Fatguy3 its called remarking. Any company could easily buy a lower end CPU, up the multiplier and sell it in a system as a higher end CPU and make profit off of it.

Therefore, only lower multiples are available.

The FX-51 is not locked at all however.

[surenw]

just as a note for the future.... THE INQUIRER is all speculation, all the "exclusive" news from there is what they think so if you find something, just try other well known hardware news sites to confirm.

peace out