AMD Thunderbird & Duron Overclocking Revealed

We’ve proven that the clock multiplier of the Thunderbird/Duron can still be modified, including on currently shipping CPUs as we went out and got our hands on a few currently available CPUs to make sure. 

And we’ve already shown how it can be done on one motherboard in particular, the FIC AZ-11, but there shouldn’t be anything stopping ASUS, ABIT, AOpen, Gigabyte, Microstar or any other company from implementing a similar control on their boards as well without forcing us to modify the boards ourselves.

So is there any potential downfall to our recently discovered methodology?  Well, the possibility still remains that AMD could simply disconnect the four BP_FID pins from the die, which we would have guessed would be the case since they are listed as ‘NC’ in the currently available documentation on the Thunderbird/Duron.

For whatever reason, the currently available Thunderbird/Duron CPUs have these BP_FID pins connected to the die, and if AMD really wants to prevent unscrupulous vendors from selling overclocked systems they could very easily make sure that the four BP_FID pins aren’t bonded to the die.  Whether or not they will is another question and only time will tell if they will pursue that avenue of multiplier locking.