The Quest for tweaking a Socket-A CPU ...
A closer look at Thunderbird tweaking ...

A while ago I bought a Thunderbird Athlon 700 MHz (one of the first to arrive the market) and was quite happy to see that I actually had n unlocked version. My first reaction was of course wow! I thought it should be possible to at least reach 900 MHz with this CPU easily without extra cooling. Boy was I wrong ... 

To overclock a CPU there are of course many factors that must accompany the CPU. First of all you need a rock steady system and the latest hardware. Huh the latest hardware ? Yes, you need to carefully choose for example a mainboard. 

The Basics of overclocking - For you readers who don't know how to over clock, here comes some basics. There are two things that determine the speed of the processor. There is the Front side bus (FSB) and the multiplier. The FSB is simply multiplied with the multiplier. Simple, eh? In this case the default setting for the Thunderbird 700 is 100 MHz FSB and the multiplier is 7. 100 x 7 = 700 MHz. So when to over clock you alter the FSB or multiplier to get a higher CPU speed. But why don't you change the multiplier? That would make the over clocking more effective?  That was possible back in the days before Intel (and AMD) locked the multiplier to prevent over clocking. But alteration of the FSB is, thanks god highly supported by the motherboard manufacturers. Practically it's made through BIOS. On older motherboards you use jumpers on the main board. To make an over-clocked system run stable you might have to raise the core volt to the processor. It's the same procedure there, you change the in BIOS or with jumpers. But there is always a but… Over clocking raises the temperature in your system and may damage it. The components may be harmed if they receive a higher volt than specified. And no warranty in the world will cover that. So be careful and you might get a faster system for less $. 

The 1st mainboard I used for this Thunderbird was a Gigabyte 7ZX. This is a really steady mainboard but a terrible overclocker ! If you go beyond an FSB of 103Mhz the system would choke and hang. Furthermore this mainboard does not have the option to change the processor's multiplier and that's a damn shame with this CPU. So we called ABit and one day later I had this shiny ABit KT7-RAID mainboard delivered. This mainboard is an actual tweakers wet dream compared to the 7ZX. The CPU multiplier can be adjusted in basically anything you want it to be, FSB speeds can be changed without any hassle and the CPU voltage can be boosted without  trouble up-to 1.85 volts for a Thunderbird CPU. Let me remind you that this is a higher voltage then the Duron uses. Lovely ! So we installed that puppy and got it working easily. The system was now running at 800 MHz within 10 seconds. Still I was not satisfied .. that Thunderbird should be boosted towards 900 MHz. I started up a Hardware monitor and noticed that the CPU in a full burst was actually at 59 Degrees Celsius, yikes! that's too much. I looked at the 8 dollar fan and was thinking .. hmmm I must get me one of those Silver Orb fans to cool that CPU better !