Reliability of Pencil Trick

jimmygates

Platinum Member
Sep 4, 2000
2,134
2
81
I have the 900mhz Thunderbird and was wondering how reliable is the pencil trick? Does the graphite fade and get less reliable over time? I went over the copper bridges pretty good with the lead pencil and successfully got the system up to 1050mhz. The system ran very stable at 1050mhz for around two weeks. The temp was @ 41°C under load during most of the two weeks. Sometime around the middle of the third week, my system hardlocked and I had the reboot the system. The system rebooted itself at the default 900mhz even though in the BIOS the settings were for 1050mhz. I'm just curious if anyone else was having some of the same results.


-Jimbo
 

paulip88

Senior member
Aug 15, 2000
908
0
0
Personally i have had my suspicions about the same thing. I can always get 850 the day of the pencil application. but it would always fail the day after.

To see if the pencil was at fault, I tried some of the conductive stuff from a defogger repair kit. Not sure whether it works any better though. My hard drive died on me about a day after.
 

manualman

Member
Jun 26, 2000
29
0
0
I've been running the pencil trick on various speeds on my 750 t-bird w/A7V for about four weeks now, no problems...I can reach all the way to 892 without a hitch, but I am still not sure if I could get higher then that, maybe with better ram...if it fails, just reapply the graphite. I have also heard good things about the defogger, but you need a steady hand. Good luck!!!!
 

DaddyG

Banned
Mar 24, 2000
2,335
0
0
The Loctite defogger repair fluid is much better than the pencil deal. Defoggers pull lots of current and after the recommended 24hr drying the repair can handle this. The small amount of current that is passed through the bridges is a no-brainer.