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Athlon Unlocking Nightmare

HailBallz

Member
I recently aquired an Athlon 1.1 and an Asus A7V133. I got the system up and running so I decided it would be a good idea to unlock it and overclock it. Well I read all over the internet that the "pencil trick" was easy and almost fool proof. Well I connected the L1 bridges with my pencil and turned my computer on. Well the computer wouldn't boot, it would lock at various times during the boot process. So I erased the pencil marks and tried it again, the computer still locked on boot. So thinking I fried my Athlon I plugged in a Duron 900 I had lying around, well with the Duron in it would get to the Windows 2K startup and blue screen. So I tried to reinstall Windows, well when the setup started it blue screened on me again.

Does anybody have any idea of what went wrong? Did I ruin my processor and motherboard? Or just one of them?

Any help will on this matter will be greatly appreciated.
 
First of all, make sure that all pencil markings are completely removed, and that there is no rubber or other dirt around the CPU and the socket. It's possible that you cross-connected a couple of bridges.

When you post, check your voltages and temperatures in the BIOS.
 
If the bridges were crossed the CPU could have been damaged, but in my experience that doesn't happen too often. Definately do as Alphazero and Brian48 said, both are excellent points. A couple other things to consider (forgive me if you already thought of these):

- Are you making sure that you are grounded before working on the components? (ie using an anti-static wriststrap) You may be surprised how little static it takes to screw up computer components.

- Are you using a magnifying glass when making the pencil markings? If you have coke bottles for glasses, they don't count.😛 I borrowed a neat setup from my dad to do mine, it was a magnifying glass and light that mounted on a workbench. I'll have to ask him where he got it....

- Make double sure that there are no stray pencil markings, pet hairs, dust bunnies, or cockroach droppings😛 covering any of the other bridges or even on the pins of the cpu. As much as I was kidding about the hair and stuff, take a dry Swifter cloth ( the dust catching thingy) and swipe over the mobo socket. Something such as a strand of hair or dust may be all that's needed to cause a connection problem with one of the pins.

Good luck and let us know what happens!
 
One more thing. The Athlon 1.1 and the Duron 900 are 100 fsb. Make sure that the memory settings are set to CAS3 (to be sure) and the bus is set to 100. If all goes well, then procede to tweak from there, but you will probably not get better than 106-110 fsb with that MB from my experience.
 
I cleaned up the processor and it now seems to be working fine, thank God. But I still have the blue screen problem with Windows. It gives me one of the following errors: IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL, DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL or REGISTRY ERROR. I can boot in safe mode, but when I try to run it normally it blue screens on me. Anybody got any ideas why this is happening?

I did use a magnifying glass when I put the pencil marks on, but I must have screwed something up. Those L1 bridges should be bigger 🙂

Thanks for the help guys.
 
since you are having problems with two processors

I would clear cmos and make sure all your components specially memory are seated properly.

its sounds like a memory or heat issue

are you putting the heatsink on properly? (good contact with die) is the fan spinning? dont mean to sound insulting, just reminding you of the common errors

I have had several unlocking problems before and none of them damaged the cpu. I am actually running a 1600xp with some some crossed bridges, running perfectly well on 10x but I am missing lower multipliers. Too lazy to fix it.

peace
 
Well, believe it or not, my computer is back to working fine. I guess it's just moody and doesn't like it when I try to overclock it. 🙂 I just came home from school and turned it on, not expecting it to work, and it did. Well my problem seems to be solved. But I would still like to try to overclock it, anybody have some suggestions?

 
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