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The first time I built a PC, and the first time I mounted a heatsink, was to one of these bare die AMD CPUs. I heard about the fragility of these, and must have read the directions about ten times, and paused and checked each step about five times while doing it. It came out fine, but it was nerve wracking as hell.

Overclocking an Athlon XP 2500+ to a 3200+ was pretty cool. Easiest overclock ever.

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Even as a naive teen, I always found the mechanical forces required to clamp cpu heatsinks and fans brutally high considering the small ceramic package underneath.

Was that the ol’ pencil mod?

No. AMD was taking 3200+ chips and binning/selling them as 2500+ chips. All it took was increasing the FSB speed in the BIOS, and a bit of luck from the silicon lottery. No hardware mods.

Reminds of me of the Celeron 300A to 450 overclock.

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