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Disabling half of a Barton's cache

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by -Xp-, 11 Aug 2004.

  1. -Xp-

    -Xp- Minimodder

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    Basically, an incident with a 2500+, a waterblock and a dodgy nut left me with a chunk missing form my CPU's core. Quite a large chunk - quite a few people were surprised that the chip still POSTed. Imagine a triangle, about 3mm tall, 5mm wide, taken out of the bottom-left corner of the CPU die. For those of you who havn't seen the core layout, this is in the corner of part of the Barton's L2 cache. Since the incident, my chip hasn't been able to go above an FSB of roughly 170mhz, and at stock speed performs at about 2300+ spec (Sandra reports it between 2000+ and 2400+). Since it's a Pre-week 39 AQXEA, and has hit 2.6ghz before, I really want to be able to squeeze some more juice out of it.

    My question goes out to people like ZapWizard. I want to be able to disable half my L2 cache, leaving me with 256kb of L2 cache, and essentially a thoroughbred core. I know that I can disable all the L2 cache (when I do, it overclocks fine, but performance sucks, obviously), but there's little point in doing that.

    If anyone knows how I can get around my "problem" (by disabling half of my L2 cache, or by any other means), then any help would be much appreciated.
     
  2. Firehed

    Firehed Why not? I own a domain to match.

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    I'd google up on one of those thoroughbred to barton mods where you enable it, but cut the bridge instead of join it. I know I've seen articles but I can't point you to any :sigh:
     
  3. Kameleon

    Kameleon is watching you...

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    That's Thorton -> Barton, the Tbred core doesn't physically have the extra 256K ;) But yes, the mod is well-known, and should be relatively simple to reverse, depending on the chip packaging.
     
  4. Firehed

    Firehed Why not? I own a domain to match.

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    Whatever, it's been a while since I looked at it. Same concept. It just means the tbred->barton mod has a 100% failure rate :hehe:
     
  5. Piratetaco

    Piratetaco is always right

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  6. -Xp-

    -Xp- Minimodder

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    I have a pic, but it's on my other PC, which isn't here. I'll upload as soon as I get to my PC (which I left a friends house since it is caseless and watercooled - too much trouble to bring back).

    But I managed to steal this from one of Zapwizards posts!

    [​IMG]

    You can see the cache taking up the bottom half. Imagine about half of the bottom-left quadrant being chopped off.
     
  7. dead_man

    dead_man Confucious say: WTF???

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    ok i understand completely bout disabling half the cache, but how do u disable the bad half? is that even possible? could b disabling ur good cache and leaving ur bad cache...my head hurts :wallbash:
     
  8. -Xp-

    -Xp- Minimodder

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    I'm assuming that, since a Barton is just a modified Thoroughbred, the bottom cache has been "shoved on" to the core. I assume if I was to make it into a TB, the bottom bit would be disabled.
     

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