Can I overclock my Athlon?
Probably. All indications are that AMD’s fabrication process is producing excellent yields, and the quality seems to be improving over time. Most Athlons seem to have a little bit of flexibility in terms of clock speed, though each chip is different. With any luck, your Athlon will probably overclock fairly well. For instance, the results of an informal survey posted on Usenet revealed that some time around week 42 of production, AMD started selling Athlon 650’s as Athlon 500’s. The core itself is stamped with a 650, and the cache chips are 3.3 or 3.1 ns chips capable of running at 650 MHz. In other words, AMD was apparently doing so well that the worst cores they were producing were capable of 650 MHz. For a much more comprehensive survey of how rated speeds, weeks of production and core/cache speeds relate, take a look at this site.
