Voor wie zich niet schuwt om zelf de soldeerbout ter hand te nemen heeft Ninja Micro (bekend van hun FreeSpeed Athlon GFD) een tabelletje in elkaar gedrukt met alle L2 divider settings voor de Athlon 500 t/m 750. Vertraging van de L2 cache snelheid kan helpen om een hogere core clock te halen, maar volgens de ervaringen van Ninja Micro heeft dit pas zin wanneer de winst in kloksnelheid behoorlijk groot is (thanks vsmb@superweb.nl" rel="external">ovs voor de tip):
The first interesting thing we discovered was the cache setting resistors were the same arrangement as on an Athlon 500 with 1/2 divider (the 700 is meant to be different). Now our 700 until now has only ever been able to reach 800 and has always failed to even post 850. So we adjusted the cache to 1/3. That did the trick.....a rock solid 850Mhz at 1.75Vcore. Next for 900 *gulp*. The system posted fine but would not quite get into windows, even with a crazy 1.9Vcore.This proves that on a Athlon 700, the cache is holding you back around 50Mhz, but 900Mhz seems to be just to much for the core to handle. (though a later 700 core may have better luck).
One other interesting note is that though the system at 850Mhz feels very quick and most benchmarks confirm this, Quake2 now benches around 7 FPS slower......this may lead to the conclusion that it's better to have a 50Mhz slower CPU than have a faster one with slower cache
.....at least as far as games are concerned (this would be offset if you could reach a extra 100Mhz)
So for all you folks already pushing your 500s to 850Mhz, think twice about cache adjustment, 900Mhz may not make as much difference as you would think.....and you are not going to get past 900 without sub zero cooling systems
