Speed Strip - Athlon XP Unlocking Device

Originally, I intended on putting a picture of showing how the CPU is slightly elevated with the Speed Strip installed.  This elevation was only noticeable when you really looked closely and was small enough that it proved too challenging to capture with a picture.  This tiny bit is enough to void your AMD warranty because of non-perfect mounting but then again overclocking your chip will also void your warranty. 

When time came to install a heatsink, two concerns came to mind.  First, we wondered if the processor would be more prone to damage with the increased elevation on one corner.   i.e. crushing a corner: you Thunderbird owners know exactly what I'm talking about.  Secondly, if we don't damage the CPU physically, will the heatsink mount properly and be completely flush across the processor core? 

Performance

We installed and tested with a variety of three pronged and single pronged coolers and did not see any temperature differences with and without the Speed Strip installed.  This seems to indicate that the heatsink is mating if not flush, so close to flush that it may as well be.

As far as trying the Speed Strip out for what it was meant for we used our new test bed which included an Athlon 2400 XP+.  Testing was straight forward, did it or did it not unlock the processor on our VIA KT600 mainboard.

Test Bed

• ABIT KV7 mainboard
• AMD Athlon TBred XP 2400+ 
• ThermalRight SLK-800 w/ Tt Smart Fan II
• OCZ 512mb PC3200 EL DDR
• Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 30gb ATA133 HDD
• Generic 52x CD-ROM
• Thermaltake 480w PSU
• Windows XP Professional

Our multiplier adjustments were unlocked as advertised giving us a range of 5 to 12.5 for the multiplier.  As a point of reference, the 2400 XP+ operates on a 266MHz bus (133MHz x 2) with a multiplier of 15.  After some hit and miss we found the wall on our XP processor with the Speed Strip.  398Mhz bus (199MHz x 2) with a multiplier of 12.5.  That's 2.49Ghz!!  To give you some perspective on this, the Athlon 3000 XP runs at 13 x 333Mhz (166Mhz x 2).  That's 2.16GHz.  Nuff said??

  

Conclusion

We found the Speed Strip to be far easier to use than most all unlocking kits out on the market.  Installation time is less than a minute and this is without any permanent changes to your processor.  The results speak for themselves.  The down side, worth mentioning again, is the processor mounting.  We were unable to find any evidence with a multitude of coolers and clips that this slight processor elevation caused any problems.  It was discomforting all the same.  Outside of this, we found the Speed Strip to be a cost effective and worthwhile product to get some added life and performance out of your processor.   Kudos to the Speed Strip folks for innovation here. 

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