Stepping????

I've seen users post their "stepping". As I'm still kind of new to the OCing thing, what is this and how important is it?

FYI these are the specs on my chip:

AMD ATHLON
AX2000DMT3C
AGOIA 0215WPKW
9694783089
1999AMD

A "Stepping" normally refers to when and where your chip was made, and basically, how well it will overclock. AGOIA is the 2nd best stepping for overclocking usually, it's always the luck of the draw though (AROIA "Y" 0220 being #1). Yours is an AGOIA "9" 0215, I think you should get a decent overclock out of it. Perhaps someone can chime in on the actual meaning of each number

Cool...

Thanks for the insight there. I'm not quite brave enough to mess around with filling in the bridges on it yet tho. I've been having some bugs in my system as of late. I had to swap out MOBO's as the one in my sig died after not even a month of use... and it wasn't even overclocked....

Any other input is welcome..

Thanks

palee, PC Chips motherboards are known as being pretty much the worst motherboards in existence, so you should not be surprised that it crapped out

I'm not brave enough to unlock an XP either

Yeah, I realized that AFTER I bought it. It was part of a bare bones setup, and I needed a new (cheap) case for my nephew. I had a motherboard (ECS) the I bought and I couldn't get it to work with a different CPU (thunderbird 1.3 I think). I tried it with my 2000+ and it works fine... So I'll RMA it, see if they will be willing to give me an upgrade MOBO (I'll pay the difference), then get another CPU (1700+ on sale at new egg I believe...) and see what I get.....

Here's my definition:

A stepping is a "geek" term for revision. As the chip progresses newer revisions/stepping are developped. Newer steppings will remove bugs and so on from previous steppings and can result in a higher overclock.

I also found this on our Overclockers.com website:

What does stepping mean?

Celerons come in four flavors. The C266 and C300 without L2 cache and the C300A and C333 with 128 Kb L2 cache. Each type of Celeron has several slightly different variations, called a "stepping". Stepping 0 (zero) cores are the original production run. When minor imperfections (bugs) are found in the instruction programming (micro-code) of the core or in other parameters of the chip, they are fixed and the next batch of cores will incorporate the changes. This batch will be identified as stepping 1. If another change is required later, the stepping number will be incremented again. As each successive refinement to the chip is made, the next higher stepping number will be assigned. For many reasons, one stepping may be easier to overclock than another, but usually the higher stepping cores make the best, most stable CPU's.