8 ms·
> Duron Now there's a name I haven't heard in a while. Duron, the poorerer man's Celeron.
by cptskippy 7y ago
> Duron
Now there's a name I haven't heard in a while. Duron, the poorerer man's Celeron.
- sitzkrieg 7y agothe best part is that durons were better than celerons and cheaper for quite some time
- unixhero 7y agoThe duron had a pencil trick which unlocked it somehow. I don't remember the details.
- BrainInAJar 7y agoit 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
- Ice_cream_suit 7y agoThe 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-duron-and-athlon-using-pencil_08.html http://computer-communication.blogspot.com/2007/06/unlocking...
- dylan604 7y agoI 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-sided_disk
- flyinghamster 7y agoOh, 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.
- ngcc_hk 7y agoWow! Old man and the puncher ... those were the days.
- BlueTemplar 7y agoSome would just have been faulty units : tried to turn my tri-core into a 4-core, but it didn't work...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Geeflow 7y agoI used this trick, and it did indeed work as intended. It was a little scary ("You want me to draw on my CPU?!?"), though.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jmuhlich 7y agoThe 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.
- sizzle 7y agoWhat about athalons?
- alliao 7y agoCeleron 300A, the relative poorer man's Pentium
- wtallis 7y agoWeren't they also supported by the Abit BP6 motherboard, letting you use two of them as poorer man's Xeons?
- Zenst 7y agoYes, 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.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- rootusrootus 7y agoIndeed 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.
- StillBored 7y agoI 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.
- milesward 7y agoYup, dual 450 celery was my gaaaangster setup at my silly startup :)
- dguaraglia 7y agoHahah, 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.
- rconti 7y agoCyrix/Nexgen 5x86/133!
- cptskippy 7y agoIn 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.
- nonamenoslogan 7y agoMy first was an AMD 286 @ 12MHz, still have it in a cigar box somewhere.
- willvarfar 7y agoStarted 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.
- Klinky 7y agoThe "math co-processor" chip was actually a full DX33 and your SX33 CPU was disabled. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80487SX https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80487SX
- tr352 7y agoCyrixInstead ™ represent!
- therein 7y agoThis comment made me nod my head in agreement, laugh and also experience a wave of nostalgia. All at once.
- bashinator 7y agoI once overclocked one with a pencil. Just connected the solder points between some leads on the CPU package.
- eganist 7y agoSeems 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 https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=840954 Tangent: I love that I can pull up forum threads from two decades ago.
- winrid 7y agoI remember when I got my first free 1ghz PIII machine in high school. This was like 2009. Huge difference from my 450mhz PIII machine.
- kubami 7y agoAh! 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!
- playworker 7y agoI 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 :)
- zouhair 7y agoI couldn't afford either.
- talonx 7y agoYou meant poorer, I presume. Poorerer might be something in a calculator?
- cosmodisk 7y agoThose were the days when I could give full specs for 20 or so CPUs off top of my head.Good times.
- Tostino 7y agoI 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.
- tzjmetron 7y agoWhich itself was the poorer man's Pentium.
- zentiggr 7y agoWas 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.