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Success! I have an Athlon 500 running stable at 700 MHz on an Asus K7M.
I have been wanting to do this for a long time now and the chance suddenly became available Saturday.
I was browsing the internet Saturday mourning and the website of a local store said they had Asus K7M’s. I called and sure enough they had them in stock, along with an Athlon 500. So I told the guy to pull them and that I would be down to get them. I had still not picked up a solder station to do the SMD rework on the Athlon, so that was the first stop. I was trying to find a station that I could buy that also had tips available that could be modified to be able to work with the SMD’s. I was having a hard time finding one in my price range, when poof, there it was. A tool designed for working with all sorts of surface mounted devices.
After buying the tool I needed for modifying the Athlon, I headed to Micro X-press in Indianapolis. Upon arriving in Indianapolis I missed the exit I needed and when I got to the next exit, the turn lane I needed to get back on the freeway was backed up. So I thought it would be better to turn right, which had no cars to wait behind, and just use the local roads. Wrong, right through 5 miles of shopping centers on a Saturday afternoon. I made it to the store 5minutes before it closed, man was I stressing bad.
The trip home was uneventful and upon arriving home I began to work on exchanging the MB and CPU.
After everything was installed, I inserted the Win98 boot disk and turned it on. After the bios popped up the alarm went off Waaa Naaa Waaa Naaa WTF so I shut it down and looked over every thing and nothing was out of place so I turned it back on and after a while it stopped. I found out later that ignoring the fan speeds in the bios would stop the alarm. At the dos prompt I typed Setup and everything went smooth until it started detecting hardware right after rebooting from the file copying. BSOD. I tried everything I could imagine to get it to work. I found out Sunday mourning that some PC100 ram won’t work with the K7M.
Man, Sunday sure was a long day. Monday mourning I left once again, this time to pick up some ram.
I picked up a 128 Mb stick of Corsair PC133 ram, that has Siemens 7.5 chips on it and headed home. When I got home I stuck the new ram in and Win98 installed perfectly and ran perfectly stable. After making sure my system was setup correctly and running stable, I proceeded to disassemble the cartridge. With the cover and heat plate removed I found the resistors to be half the size that I had been practicing on. They where twice as hard to move, but the tool I bought works like a charm.
It booted right up at 700 but locked up with an error while windows was loading. I shut it off and bumped the voltage to 1.7 on the MB. Windows booted fine and did not crash on any benchmarks or while looping Quake II for 2 Hrs. After I was satisfied that it was stable I changed the resistors to 1.7v and put the cover back on.
If you have an Athlon processor and want to use the full potential, I will modify yours for $100.00 plus shipping. I have a warranty (Lifetime) only on the solder work that I do on pre-bought CPU’s.
30 day Warranty on Pre-Modified CPU’s. Email me if you want more details.
mikehdft@msn.com
Mike H
I was browsing the internet Saturday mourning and the website of a local store said they had Asus K7M’s. I called and sure enough they had them in stock, along with an Athlon 500. So I told the guy to pull them and that I would be down to get them. I had still not picked up a solder station to do the SMD rework on the Athlon, so that was the first stop. I was trying to find a station that I could buy that also had tips available that could be modified to be able to work with the SMD’s. I was having a hard time finding one in my price range, when poof, there it was. A tool designed for working with all sorts of surface mounted devices.
After buying the tool I needed for modifying the Athlon, I headed to Micro X-press in Indianapolis. Upon arriving in Indianapolis I missed the exit I needed and when I got to the next exit, the turn lane I needed to get back on the freeway was backed up. So I thought it would be better to turn right, which had no cars to wait behind, and just use the local roads. Wrong, right through 5 miles of shopping centers on a Saturday afternoon. I made it to the store 5minutes before it closed, man was I stressing bad.
The trip home was uneventful and upon arriving home I began to work on exchanging the MB and CPU.
After everything was installed, I inserted the Win98 boot disk and turned it on. After the bios popped up the alarm went off Waaa Naaa Waaa Naaa WTF so I shut it down and looked over every thing and nothing was out of place so I turned it back on and after a while it stopped. I found out later that ignoring the fan speeds in the bios would stop the alarm. At the dos prompt I typed Setup and everything went smooth until it started detecting hardware right after rebooting from the file copying. BSOD. I tried everything I could imagine to get it to work. I found out Sunday mourning that some PC100 ram won’t work with the K7M.
Man, Sunday sure was a long day. Monday mourning I left once again, this time to pick up some ram.
I picked up a 128 Mb stick of Corsair PC133 ram, that has Siemens 7.5 chips on it and headed home. When I got home I stuck the new ram in and Win98 installed perfectly and ran perfectly stable. After making sure my system was setup correctly and running stable, I proceeded to disassemble the cartridge. With the cover and heat plate removed I found the resistors to be half the size that I had been practicing on. They where twice as hard to move, but the tool I bought works like a charm.
It booted right up at 700 but locked up with an error while windows was loading. I shut it off and bumped the voltage to 1.7 on the MB. Windows booted fine and did not crash on any benchmarks or while looping Quake II for 2 Hrs. After I was satisfied that it was stable I changed the resistors to 1.7v and put the cover back on.
If you have an Athlon processor and want to use the full potential, I will modify yours for $100.00 plus shipping. I have a warranty (Lifetime) only on the solder work that I do on pre-bought CPU’s.
30 day Warranty on Pre-Modified CPU’s. Email me if you want more details.
mikehdft@msn.com
Mike H
Email me for more information
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