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What are these "burn marks"?

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Permanoob

Member
Joined
Feb 27, 2004
Location
SLC, UT
I took my CPU out yesterday for a little work on my wire trick and such and noticed what look like burn marks on my cpu.

I looked at AMD's website at their promotional stills and I see the same thing on their processors. I had a couple of extra ones on mine. I tried to take a picture of my proc but my camera has crappy macro shots.

Here's AMD's promo pic with the areas circled in red that match the "burns" on mine. And the blue circle is where I have a "burn" that theirs doesn't.

What are these?

burn.jpg
 
Those burn marks are where AMD cut the connections for the bridges that they are in between. They use a laser for this process, resulting in the burning. Having different bridges cut and connected result in different settings for the CPU (default voltage, default multiplier, XP/MP, etc).

The L1 bridges (what you say are cut on your CPU) determine wether your chip is unlocked or not. On Palominos, all the L1 bridges would be cut, making it impossible to change the multiplier of the chip through the BIOS. I believe the TBreds had the connections left uncut making the chip unlocked. You can reconnect them if you want, though if your chip is one of the so called 'superlocked' ones, even reconnecting them won't unlock the chip.

JigPu
 
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