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cptskippy

> Duron

Now there's a name I haven't heard in a while. Duron, the poorerer man's Celeron.

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This comment made me nod my head in agreement, laugh and also experience a wave of nostalgia. All at once.

I once overclocked one with a pencil. Just connected the solder points between some leads on the CPU package.

Seems to have been a fairly common trick with the Durons. I sadly never experienced the rush of trying it mostly because Athlons and PIIIs were all I'd ever played with when the 1ghz chips started coming out, but this was probably what made the Durons so attractive to student hackers. https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=840954

Tangent: I love that I can pull up forum threads from two decades ago.

I remember when I got my first free 1ghz PIII machine in high school. This was like 2009. Huge difference from my 450mhz PIII machine.

Ah! Athlons. My overclocking journey picked up when I built a DIY watercooler out of a bent 5mm cooper sheet (at which thickness you stop calling it "sheet"?) polished to a mirror finish. At some point, during the peak of easter european winter I kept the heat exchanger outside in the -20*C temperatures!

I remember doing this too, it unlocked the multiplier which they locked at the factory by slicing through some metal blocks with a laser. My Duron 600 would run at 800 with a normal cooler & fan, then I added a really loud Delta fan and a copper heatsink and it was stable at a magical 1Ghz. Eventually I got cocky enough to solder a resistor between a certain pin on the motherboard and earth which effectively increased all the voltage settings in the BIOS so I could push enough voltage through it to run at 1.2Ghz - it ran like this for years as my only PC. Good times :)

luuuucky. i only got the k6 :O

I had a K6-233 which was always on the verge of overheating (or maybe I was obsessing a bit too much about monitoring it). I envied my friend's K6-200, which was more stable it seemed.

My K6-233 got so hot it demagnetized its CPU fan. I noticed after the floating point unit fried the first time I tried to play some post-quake FPS.

After that, it would boot, but the antivirus software I was running said it had a virus. I guess that was the only msdos program in the boot sequence that performed floating point.

I had a K6-II which I put a big heatsink and large fan on (had to ghetto mod the mounting), sawed a 120mm hole in the case just above the cpu and put another fan there. It overclocked handsomely and stable after that. I don't remember the exact frequencies but I think it was 266MHz stock and clocked close to 400MHz with some modifications.

Hahah, I can relate so much with the 'poorerer' part, I'll raise you another one: my first '686' was a Cyrix 6x86 because those were the cheapest you could get. Eventually got my hands on a Pentium II and had to scavenge parts to replace my setup.

Good times. Nowadays I just buy a laptop with everything soldered on it and complain a lot if I have to reboot it every month.

Cyrix/Nexgen 5x86/133!

In the late 90s I had a 486sx33 with one of those Cyrix 586 upgrade chips for the math co-processor slot. It was so hot it had a fan on it! Crazy!

I also maxed out the RAM to 32mb and upgrade the SRAM in my Trident video card so I could do 256 color in Windows 95.

I also had a 40mb Erwin Tape Drive for backing up my 100mb HDD. It wasn't fast but it was faster than reinstalling Tie Fighter from Floppies.

My first was an AMD 286 @ 12MHz, still have it in a cigar box somewhere.

Started with a zx81, graduated to a 286 with a whopping 2MB RAM, which was really really much, but at a time when everyone else was getting 386s.

The "math co-processor" chip was actually a full DX33 and your SX33 CPU was disabled.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80487SX

CyrixInstead ™ represent!

Waay back in the day.. 286 12mhz with 1mb ram and a 10mb RLL drive. Setting the jumpers on the drive controller block was a nightmare that I still have. I think there were 16 or 32 pins and all the jumpers had to be just right or no dice (no drive). Further along I had a 40mhz Cyrix 4x86 I think, with 4mb ram and a Trident VGA 256 color card. I remember the ram being old school block chips and not SIMM modules. It's been a long time, so I could be mistaking the memory type between mobos. Was a great 3.11 machine for the time.

Celeron 300A, the relative poorer man's Pentium

Weren't they also supported by the Abit BP6 motherboard, letting you use two of them as poorer man's Xeons?

Yes, I owned two of those - alas they ended up being the period of bad capacitors but for the money - wow. Was amazing and for many, one of the only dual cpu systems they ever owned as a home user - even to this day unless you buy a cheap second hand workstations/server platform of ebay or the like.

Indeed they were. I had that exact setup. Overclocked the hell out of them. Unlike the 550 MHz someone else suggested, I'm 97.6% sure I only had them clocked at 450 MHz.

I built a bunch of them and still have mine in the attic. But alas your probably like me and by the time I actually purchased one for myself the overclocking abilities were much less than the original ones which went from 300->500Mhz fairly easily. IIRC its because Intel was selling 400 and 450Mhz ones and binning all the good ones into the upper tier bins.

Yup, dual 450 celery was my gaaaangster setup at my silly startup :)

Dual celery story: Me being around 14, not allowed to build my own PC, but I got to spec it, I ordered dual CPU's. The company put in a dual slot 1 motherboard, and then two celerons in slot1 adapters.. that didn't support SMP. After complaining for a while, they traded the two celerons and adapters for a single P3 (I think I was being had). It took a year or two before I was able to afford the second P3. I still hold a grudge towards that particular computer shop, or I would, hadn't they gone out of biz. I did run a lot of SETI@home on that P3, it earned me my first two certificates :D

I had a BP6 and remember 450 too (I may still have it tucked away somewhere). I think there was a 333 that could be pushed to 550 or something but not in SMP and I think it was slot 1 and not socket 370.

YES. That was the first rig I ever built and I can still remember installing Slackware on it from a zillion floppies.

+1 here who had the Abit BP6 dual celery setup. Had a pair of 400s running at close to 500 all the time. Both were lapped down to copper running FEP32 global win coolers. The wonders of Windows 2000 gaming machine with the GeForce 256 which was quickly followed by a GeForce 2 GTS upgrade as soon as it game out. Running quake on one CPU and no stutter MP3s on priority on the other. Good times.

oh man I had a Celeron 300A that ran at 464mhz for yeeeeears. Hit the 504(?) day uptime bug where the counter reset to 0.

464? I run mine at just 450 and I was so proud of it. Now, this 464 -> 450 explains (I hope so) why I lost so many online Quake 3 battles ;]

yeah it was something like, you ran a lower clock speed but a higher multiplier? I've been out of the hardware game... well, ever since then. But that's my recollection. 450 vs 464 was the first place you were likely to see stability issues depending on your specific setup, but most were stable to at least 464.

I still have 2 of these in my old hardware box. I used to run them at 4.5x100MHz on Abit BH6 single CPU mobo. Great way for me to bump performance as a poor CompSci student. And yeah, I ran SETI@home on them as well.

Overclocked to 450! Way more bang for your buck!

Those were the days when I could give full specs for 20 or so CPUs off top of my head.Good times.

I was right along with you when I was helping my parents pick out their next PC purchase, a p3 450, and from then on just consumed every single cpu article and review I could find, so much knowledge that I picked up about the computer industry in general has helped me later in my career.

the best part is that durons were better than celerons and cheaper for quite some time

The duron had a pencil trick which unlocked it somehow. I don't remember the details.

it was cheaper for AMD to produce one chip and then selectively cut the multiplier lines to differentiate sku for different market segments, so if you closed the lines again you'd get a different, faster clock multiplier

The pencil trick:

"Unlocking the Duron and Athlon Using [a] Pencil

Hold your CPU in your left hand and look very closely at the CPU, so as to clearly see the L1 bridges.

Use a business card to separate the bridges so that you do not connect the L1 bridges to each other. Work your way across the bridges from left to right (using a business card as a separation tool) and connect the bridges by rubbing the pencil back and forth over the bridges about twenty times until it is dark black, not the normal gold color. Make sure that all the bridges are reconnected, but not touching each other, and you are on your way.

I know it sounds incredible, but that is actually all there is to it. Your processor, if done correctly, is ready to be overclocked. It can now be set to run at different clock frequencies, eliminating the need to increase the FSB."

http://computer-communication.blogspot.com/2007/06/unlocking...

I had never heard of this trick. I love it though. Reminds me of using a hole punch to make a double sided floppy disk from a cheaper priced single sided floppy.[0]

Of course there was the AMD multi-core CPUs that had some of the cores disabled via software and sold at cheaper prices. Of course there were software hacks available to re-enable those cores.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-sided_disk

Oh, yes, the Phenom II 550 Black Edition. The early ones like the one I still have stashed away were an unsung bargain. My motherboard has a BIOS option to unlock extra cores, and so I got four cores for the price of two; at the stock clock speed all cores were rock-solid stable. I never did find any unbuffered 4GB ECC RAM sticks, so I had to settle for 4x1GB.

With 16 GB and a SATA3 controller or PCIE-to-NVMe adapter it would still be a respectable performer today, in spite of the DDR2.

Wow! Old man and the puncher ... those were the days.

Some would just have been faulty units : tried to turn my tri-core into a 4-core, but it didn't work...

I used this trick, and it did indeed work as intended. It was a little scary ("You want me to draw on my CPU?!?"), though.

The Duron had a set of circuit traces exposed on the ceramic chip carrier that were cut by laser at the factory to set the maximum allowed clock multiplier (and thus its final speed). You could reconnect all the cut traces with pencil lines and use a motherboard that let you set the multiplier directly to overclock freely.

What about athalons?

Was just helping a relative get their system back up and running after being unplugged for a bit.

Celeron 950MHz, 512MB RAM, 20GB HDD, 12x CD-ROM (not DVD :), floppy, add-on IDE Ethernet card. Win XP actually.

We have an unused Win8 desktop that we'll be refurbishing and gifting to her soon.

I couldn't afford either.

You meant poorer, I presume. Poorerer might be something in a calculator?

The celeron was for the poorer. ;-)

It was a joke.

So was my comment.

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