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Unlocking without Unlocking??

This section has been thoroughly revised after some investigation.

Many KT400 boards that we've tested in the past could not change the multiplier setting on our Thoroughbred 2100XP chip. The Epox has no such problems, and neither did the FIC AN19E. But what's hidden behind the scenes here is that the Thoroughbred chips themselves are not hard locked from the factory - their L1 bridges remain closed. So in effect Thoroughbreds (yes, even our new 2700XP chip using the Thoroughbred B core) are not locked in the traditional sense. Palomino core Athlons ARE locked because their L1 bridges have been opened (severed).

Even with the L1 bridges closed, other motherboards have problems resetting the 5 bit high range and 4 bit low range multipliers and thus allowing you to overclock your chip using a multiplier change. The AN19E/8K9A2+ could be said to allow multiplier overclocking without ADDITIONALLY unlocking a Thoroughbred (which has its L1 bridges closed). Multiplier overclocking can also be enabled on a Palomino chip that has its L1 bridges re-connected. Essentially, these motherboards allow multiplier changes without the need for the L3 bridge workaround, but the L1 bridges cannot be overlooked. Many thanks to my discussions with John Carcich, who helped clarify this entire issue, and who maintains a site dedicated to information gathered around understanding AMD's Multiplier Code and bridges.

So, in effect, this board succeeds where previous boards like the KT4 Ultra and Soyo Dragon Ultra failed, but it cannot do so unless your chip's L1 bridges are intact. When we tested this on FIC's AN19E we were able to run our 2100XP chip stably at 133x14 to reach 2200XP speeds by bumping up our core voltage to 1.725. We also tried several combinations of lower and higher multipliers with different FSB speeds.

With the Epox 8K9A2+, we were likewise able to overclock using a variety of multipliers and FSB speeds, but we were unable to make the system stable at the same speeds as the FIC AN19E. Seeing that we have a lot of boards to test, we also didn't risk pushing our chip to voltage extremes that might make the chip more stable at different settings.

Blue LED Chipset Cooler

Performance and testing

We tested this board with our current test setup:

AMD XP 2100+ "Thoroughbred"
Thermaltake Volcano 9 cooler
512MB Corsair XMS3200 DDR RAM
512MB Corsair XMS3500 DDR RAM
ATI RADEON 9700 Pro128MB
Seagate 120GB ATA133 Barracuda ST3100

We ran our tests on Windows XP with SP1, using the latest BIOS as of December 06 2002. Unless specified, the system was set to 333Mhz CL2, and the BIOS is loaded with "Optimized Defaults".

The tests will be compared against the FIC AN19E, Soyo KT400 Dragon Ultra and MSI KT4 Ultra boards, which we tested recently.