Thread: CrazyMan's 3 K7's You ain't gonna believe this one!
Some of you may recall my earlier posting where I gave the date codes of three Athlon K7-700's I had purchased for the building of my first computers ever. Those codes indicated that the date the processors were labeled was the first week of March, 1999. This implied that the die must have been started in late 1998-early 1999, and much discussion was generated by both the "Droids" and the Intellibees.
More recently I posted that I had ordered 40 more K7-700's for more new computers. There has been some interesting developments concerning the original 3 Athlon's occurring last night and today.
Last night (Thursday) I found this Australian site:
insanehardware.com
It is about the overclocking/remarking/reselling of Athlon processors. The last two photographs (the 3rd and 4th pictures) on page two (the page titled "NOW... HERE IS THE JUICE") shows grey heatsink compound that is physically located on top of each of the Athlon's two cache chips. The grey heatsink compound's function is to transfer heat from each of the Athlon's cache chips to the processor's heatplate on the Athlon's backside. Picture #3 is what an untampered processor should look like, the grey heatsink compound is uniformly squeezed down into a nice even pancake when the heatplate is pressed onto the back side of the processor during assembly. I had recently inspected my 40 new Athlons (looking up from the bottom of the processor, i.e., the motherboard edge) and remembered having seen what this picture looks like. All 40 of my new Athlon's have the appearance shown in picture #3.
Picture #4 shows what the grey heatsink compound looks like after the processor case has been removed, the heatplate has been removed (to allow access to the Athlon printed circuit board), the clocking resistors resoldered to allow a higher than AMD rated processor frequency (overclocked), and the whole thing reassembled in a new case for resale at a higher price back in the channel. The grey heatsink compound is very messy in appearance as you can see.
Friday morning I took 3 of my new Athlons and swapped them for my three original (old) Athlons. Upon inspection of the old Athlons, each had the messy grey heatsink compound appearance (as show in picture #4) indicating that each of these 3 processors had been tampered with. Furthermore, upon really close inspection of the processors' label (on the top edge of the processor where the date code is located) I could see the label had been modified. Where my processor label says "AMD-K7700MTR51B C", beneath the second 7 (shown in quotes: AMD-K7"7"00MTR51B C) I can make out the faint image of a "5". This can only be seen clearly when the incident light is just right, but it is unmistakably there. The second of these three processors looks like it also has a "5" beneath the overprinted "7". On the third processor no digit can be seen underneath the overprinted "7" but one can see that something was blackened out in that digit position.
If you are interested in seeing for yourself, the pictures of the three processors are still on the web at
go.to
It's easiest to see in the lower right hand picture. Look closely at the second "7". Can you see something crossing through the middle of that "7"? Can you see a curvature of a "5" near the bottom and slightly to the right of that "7". The "7" we see is overprinted on an original "5" and can be seen in person more clearly. Look at the lower left hand picture and notice the same thing but more subtle, in this one about all one can see is something crossing through the middle of the "7" (that something is a "5"). In the upper right hand picture one can't see anything printed beneath the overprinted "7" (they did a good job on this one).
Now study the second "7" in all three pictures. Do you notice that the vertical leg of the second "7" lacks the curvature of the "7" to its left? It's from a different font!
What this means is I have bought three overclocked K7 500 MHz Athlons and I paid for three K7 700 MHz Athlons. In other words, I got taken in the marketplace. Think of it, my first attempt to build three computers and I get three "wangoo" modified processors out of Malaysia (or some place)!!! Such indignation (hehe).
I did contact AMD in Sunnyvale, CA today and told them what I had discovered, even pointed them to the two links above. After seeing the pictures they said "Send'em in". So, Monday morning they will go back to AMD. I'll keep you posted. On the humorous side, can you imagine me trying to keep a straight face and voice while sending them to a site named insaneharware.com and then to a site called CrazyOldMan? I think I was about to lose them at that point. After seeing both sites they were very interested.
BTW, this means that I no longer have any evidence that AMD could have been ready for Athlon production in early 1999. Elmer will be overjoyed!
The only good news I can think of out of all this is those K7 500 MHz cores ran very fast, very stable, and very SMOOTH(tm-crazyoldman) even when overclocked to 700 MHz. It is to the credit of Athlon and AMD that it could do so much so well. Those three convinced me to buy forty more. Impressive!!
Kindest regards,
CrazyMan |
