It's simple economics.
They were maybe 10% of all motherboard sales for the roughly 1 year period they existed as the only AMD option.
~August 1999 slot A
~June 2000 socket A
Only 10% of those people are the kind who are inclined to tinker/upgrade.

1% of 1 year's sales might want to buy one.

myne wrote on Today, 07:52:

It's simple economics. They were maybe 10% of all motherboard sales for the roughly 1 year period they existed as the only AMD o […]
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It's simple economics.
They were maybe 10% of all motherboard sales for the roughly 1 year period they existed as the only AMD option.
~August 1999 slot A
~June 2000 socket A
Only 10% of those people are the kind who are inclined to tinker/upgrade.

1% of 1 year's sales might want to buy one.

My uncle bought a Slot-A system, K7-500, because it was cheaper than Intel. His idea was to upgrade when prices for cpus would have come down.
But he ended up going for P-4 for his wife and he got a socket A 1.4GHz + SDR.

Trashbytes wrote on Today, 07:19:

H3nrik V! wrote on Today, 05:46:

As I recall (and understand), more or less, yes. Maybe some pull-up or pull-down resistors. […]
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myne wrote on Today, 04:09:

Isn't goldfinger essentially just a jumper block? I don't recall anything particularly special about it […]
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Isn't goldfinger essentially just a jumper block?
I don't recall anything particularly special about it

Ghetto version = 2xN jumper, squish together onto fingers, and jump wires.
No?

As I recall (and understand), more or less, yes. Maybe some pull-up or pull-down resistors.

Honestly, I don't think AMD locked down overclocking of the Slot-A Athlon - on the contrary, there was an option, as opposed to Intel's cpus.

The lack of a kind of slotket for Slot-A is probably more due to the short-livedness of the platform compared to Slot-1 and thus no BIOS or VRM support etc. After all, Intel had like 4 or 5 chipsets released with Slor-1 boards?

Edit: https://www.cpu-world.com/forum/viewtopic.php … ight=goldfinger it seems that indeed it is a very simple device ..

Locked down in the sense that you needed the extra stuff to make it happen on Slot A which really did stop casual overclocking from people who had no clue unlike say the Socket 370 and Socket 7 boards where you could do it right out of the box with nothing gatekeeping it.

I agree that Slot A was rather short lived and that was likely the biggest reason for no slotkets.

Wouldn't FSB overclocking be just as easy as it was on Slot-1 and BX chipset, if the board supported it?