This idea first came to me when I was given a burnt out K6-166 chip. Iin case you don't know, the K6, K6-2 and K6-3 chips all have a metal plate stuck on top of them. I wondered to myself what is under there? So I took a screwdriver and tried to lever it off and ooops, it snapped the corner off the chip (good thing it was already fried!). This made me realise exactly how it was pieced together and how to dismantle it properly.

It was held on by a glue which was why I snapped the chip. When I eventually got the top off I realised that maybe it might aid overclocking to cool straight onto the core, which was underneath it. I will now give you some step by step instructions on how to dismantle your chip (properly!) - remember this definitely voids your warranty and quite possibly if you do it wrong could snap your chip. I am using another K6-166 chip and have not tested this on a K6-2 or K6-3 (Update, tried and tested on k6-2).

Step one

You have to get rid of the glue that holding on the plate, this is done with a sharp knife. Scrape the knife down the middle between the plate and the chip. Soon you will see the edge of the plate, that means you have probably scraped off enough glue. Do this all the way around the chip until you can see the dividing line all the way around.


Step two

You have to lever off the plate - this is the tricky bit. Start in the corner and using a flat bladed screw driver, push the screwdriver towards the plate, if you push towards the chip it is more likely to snap. Don't lever it much and keep going all the way round the chip, slowly loosening it. Eventually the whole plate will almost lever off and it can be pulled off.



Be patient, remember if you snap the chip, your done for!

When it is open you will see there is a grey paste on it. I didn't think about it at the time but this is probably quite good quality paste and you might want to reuse it, but I wiped it off and used new stuff. As you can see the core is covered by a protective green epoxy.

You might think it is quite dangerous to stick a heatsink on to the core, but I took a screwdriver and attacked the fried chip and It was very difficult to penetrate. Whatever you do, DO NOT LAP THE CORE! It is already extremely flat anyway but the layer or green is very thin and when lapped goes straight through to the silicon core itself.

Overclocking

I am using a socket 7 motherboard (not sure of brand) with an Intel VX chipset. Annoyingly there were not many overclocking options but enough for this experiment. The machine was built in 5 minutes, I just screwed the motherboard into the case with a graphics card and ran the harddrive cables through to my computer so I didn't have to reinstall the operating system. I used the heatsink and fan from my Celeron 400@550.

For stability testing I used a variety of games including Quake, Quake 2 and Half-Life.

What I wanted to do is try the chip before taking off the plate to see how far it overclocked and then pry the plate off using the above method and see if it improved overclocking.

Before I removed the plate, 200mhz (66 * 3) was very stable and 225 (75*3) with a voltage boost from 2.9 to 3.2 volts, loaded into windows and then crashed during Quake Timedemo.

I took the plate off and wiped off the grey paste, applying some standard white goop . I then put the chip back in the mobo and put on the heatsink. Still clocking at 225, It loaded into windows and quake was 100% stable, and Quake 2 and Half-Life. A result or what? I then left the stability tester running over night and after 12 hours it was still going.

Conclusion

The basic reason for doing this modification is to decrease thermal resistance from the core to the heatsink. If you want to get extra mhz out of your chip, go for it. If you are the type of person that always breaks things, don't try this. Use your judgment when levering off the plate and whatever you do, don't complain to me if it goes wrong! You might recognize the similarity between newer AMD Duron and Thunderbird chips and the K6. And similarly the same problem with crushing the core is present!

Spode