Talk:Slotket

lack of AMD slockets

"For a variety of reasons, slockets were never introduced to take advantage of AMD's transition of their Athlon processors from the Slot A form factor to the Socket A form factor." Does anyone know what those reasons were?

At a guess, I'd start with the socketed Athlons and Durons being in some way electrically incompatible with the earlier socket motherboards. Maybe the wrong number of pins, wrong voltage, etc, all of which - whilst not unsurmountable issues - would push the price of an adaptor up to unjustifiable levels (they ran at the same FSB and bus width, so that's NOT the issue). Also I believe there were cooling issues which were what actually did for the slot format, and the slower slot / early socket-A AMDs were already quite radiant beasts with very little overclocking headroom (<10%) unless you used insanity-spec coolers. I built a Duron Socket-A system from scratch in the early 2000s, and it cost me peanuts, especially considering the performance offered by an otherwise fairly modest setup. Given the improvements offered with a newer motherboard, the slight saving of upgrading an old one with a slocket adaptor (certainly more than "just a few dollars" - probably at least $10, or about a quarter that of a whole new board) just wouldn't have been worth it. Those of us using AMDs at the time found the whole bonkers slot-juggling game played by Intel and their followers as amusing as it was inexplicable. But then when you're paying through the nose for rather slow hardware, you'll go to some extremes to wring the very best out of your existing stuff. (Oh how the tables have turned since) 193.63.174.10 (talk) 17:30, 3 August 2010 (UTC)