Weird Pentium 4 with heat spreader writing at right angles....

[maverick77_uk]

Hi all,

Ok, slightly strange one here. I recently got an eBay job lot of old computer parts that I was going through. There was an old Pentium 4 soc 775 CPU. It has the normal etched writing on the heat spreader, saying it was an SL7J8 3.4GHz, but then there was also writing etched at right angles to that saying it was a SL8BM 3GHz. When tested it was the 3GHz one it was detected as. Is this a misprint CPU? Anyone seen this before? Could it have some collector value like coins do when the Royal mint makes an error?

Cheers all!

[Jonj1611]

Not sure about pricing but looks like you aren't the first to notice that : https://www.overclock.net/threads/do...ntium-4.78143/

[maverick77_uk]

Cheers for that. I managed to completely not find that old thread when I was Google searching earlier!

Oh well, I'd guess that it was a printing error at the fab, and then Dell bought a load up cheap due to the error to shove in pre-builts as 99% of them would never be seen. It's then only a few that appear when said pre-builds were broken down years later....

Oh well, might hang on to it for curiosity, or might eBay auction it for a laugh. Not sure what I'd do with the 99p I might make though!

Cheers!

[Jonj1611]

You never know!

[DanceswithUnix]

Some of these parts used by the big companies are specials, down clocked or with bits fused off from a higher end part. They get the CPUs cheaper, and then they can get away with a cheaper heatsink thanks to the reduced power consumption.

A few of us did well out of the Athlon 5200+ that was one of those: https://forums.hexus.net/motherboard...fx-5200-a.html . Ahh, happy days...

This was from the era that spawned so many anti trust lawsuits against Intel, so Intel were doing whatever it took to get their chips into machines.

[maverick77_uk]

Hi,

Yeah, back in the day I had one of those strange tri-core Athlon II X3 which unlocked nicely into a X4 propus chip.

Difference being all that and the Athlon 5200 link above vwas essentially either binning faulty chips as lower models, or deliberately rebranding chips for supply and demand reasons, which is where we all got lucky.

What's weird is the P4 thing isn't a binning, or if it is, it's at a really late stage after the silicon has been packaged and a heat spreader put on!

Cheers