By : UnaClocker
Date: 9/06/00

As Joe(At Overclockers.com) has pointed out, AMD has turned into a baby Intel, maybe worse, and have gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure nobody overclocks their CPU's. Alot of people think they did that to prevent remarking, eh, think again people. The remarker doesn't need those pins under the CPU, he's just going to cut the golden bridges, and or connect some golden bridges, and the chip will be at the speed he wants, and the average consumer (your mother) won't know what to look for. If the remarker used those pins, the average consumer would only have to look in the BIOS (with boards like Abit's) to see if the CPU was at default. No, what AMD has done is much worse, they have taken away a great hobby from a lot of people. I've heard it compared to buying a car with the hood welded shut, that's pretty accurate. As you know, with the hood welded shut, you can still get in... Well folks, I have a theory (untested, but I'd stake my reputation on it working just fine), on how to cut open the TBird and Duron hood and fix those 4 pins that don't exist anymore...

Let me direct your attention to an old article, this came out back when we didn't know that L1's were AMD's first method for locking the CPU: http://www.tweakers.net/reviews.dsp?Document=150   Most notably, page 4 where they have soldered 4 wires onto the resistor packs on top of the CPU. Well, that's the other end of those 4 BP_FID pins AMD has removed from Week 36 and later Duron/TBird's.  So, what you do, is you solder 4 wires onto there, just like you see in that picture (yes, you will need to be godlike with your soldering iron) and run the wires under your motherboard, and solder them to the pins under the socket where they belong.  This is meant as a short and sweet news article, I know it could be better, I could have mapped out which pins, and had some nice diagrams drawn out, but time does not allow for such. I have two pictures below that should help you a lot, first the picture from page 4 of the article above, and second a picture borrowed from Anandtech showing which BP_FID pin is where, so that you have a general idea where to look under your motherboard. Using this trick, Abit KT7 and Asus A7V's will have no problem changing the multiplier, even on Week 36 and later CPU's. One thing AMD has definitely done is taken overclocking away from the common folk. Very few people will have the guts, or the skills to solder on items that small. 

Now, just to recap, to replace the missing BP_FID pins (that AMD no longer installs), you run 4 wires from the resistor packs on top of the chip (someone will need to figure out which is 0, 1, 2, and 3) to the underside of the motherboard, where they will attach them to the corresponding pin of the socket. AMD cannot remove the FID pins, the system needs those. And it'll be a long time before AMD redesigns the packaging of the chip to remove those resistor packs. Oh, one last thing, ProCooling.com, and UnaClocker take no responsibility for you hosing your chip when you try this, it's a theory, test it on a cheap Duron, when you have money to blow.

--UnaClocker

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