Is Jumping the L1 Bridge worth it?

[Caveman]

I've got my machine overclocked by diddling with the FSB speed in the bios. If I change the multiplier via a "hardware" change (jumping the L1 Bridge), will I get any more cooling, stability, or system performance. A bit foggy here... Can someone clear the air? My system runs fine at 1630 MHz but I never shy away from getting a bit more... Any advantage of tweaking the hardware instead of the bios tweak?

 

[minendo]

Tweaking the hardware will allow you to lower the multiplier and up the FSB if you have decent ram. If not you could always up the multiplier and drop the fsb. I prefer to drop the multiplier and up the FSB, because faster ram means faster system.

 

[Mavrick007]

If you're going to unlock your Athlon XP by closing the L1 bridges, make sure you are really careful cause you can cause alot of problems if you accidently connect two bridges. It's like Minendo said though, you can either up the mult and down the fsb or down the mult and up the fsb.

Increasing the fsb increases the speed of everything in your machine, the Pci/AGP and the memory as well, not to mention it also increases instability issues since you are going out of spec for PCI but this might be negligible if not too much out of spec or if your board can do a better memory divider, like a 3:4 divider.

 

[Richardito]

Unlock the XP CPU. It is real easy, I still don't understand why people are afraid of doing it... After reading some posts about failures I was afraid, but the whole process was simple.

 

[Soulkeeper]

i second the worth it tally
the only processor i did it on was the older thunderbird but it was worth it and still is

 

[Zoomie]

I just bought an 1800 MP and the L1 Bridges were unlocked. For $60 more than the 1800 XP you don't have to unlock it.