I know it might be a long shot but I always have a small glimpse of hope. Recently I just killed my athlon tbird. As is I dont have any money to buy a new socket A chip. I've been looking everywhere to tryu and find one I could afford. Finally I scraped the bottom and tried to get an old duron 800 mhz chip to get my machine up and running again to only find out that AC micro has run out of stock of those chips and refuse to give me one from one of there many stores that still do have one. Anyway back to the glimmer of hope. The only thing I can find wrong with the Athlon is that one of the IC's on top of the chip is damaged. Its on of the ones near the L1 bridges that are cased in ceramic. What I want to know is are those tiny IC's memory for cache and if so is there some way I can bypass it by cutting or jumpering bridges somewhere to cut out that cache? Im willing to take the performace hit to have the machine up and running again. Im desperate here! Thanks anyone for any help in any way.