Athalon, Duron, thunderbird.. ???

[Guest]

Ok...
I built my own overclocked system a few years ago (remember the PII-300 SL2W8 clocked to 450?)

I'm ready to do it again, and was loking into the AMD options, due to price and performance.

BUT.. what the heck is the diff between the Duron, thunderbird and Athalon? I assume one is on par with the Celery chip, but what exactly IS the diff between them?

And while I have you here, is the Abit KA7 board any good? I dunno if I will be overclocking, but you never know! 🙂

Jim

 

[Guest]

the duron and thunderbird use the new socket a interface and features on die cache which is smaller but a lot faster.
don't get the old slot athlon as it memory does scale with the cpu.
Duron is the cheap budget version Thunderbird its bigger, faster and more expensive brother.

the thunderbird dosen't have as much head room for overclocking as the voltage can't be increased high enough unless you modify your motherboard, and they are also set more higher to there actual limit.

The duron is far great head room they are keeping the clock speed very low so to not take thunderbirds market.

get a duron 700 , 750
you could wait to get twin duron 750's both overclocked to a ghz

 

[Guest]

So a deal like PCNut's overclock combo with a Duron 600 tested and running at 950-1Ghz ($335 with MB, CPU, 128 PC133, fan) would be a better option than a standard 1Ghz Athalon?

Thanks for the info- food for thought!
Jim

 

[Guest]

My personal preference is to pay more for a more powerful chip (within reason), which is why I have a Thunderbird and an Abit KT7-RAID setup. On the other hand, PC Nut's entire combo costs little more than a 1 gig. Athlon, itself.

If you're thinking of overclocking in the future, I'd check to see what type of RAM PC Nut is offering with this combo. I see it's Corsair, but I suspect it's their "Value RAM." This doesn't mean it's bad at all, but you'd be better off with some potentially better stuff (for overclocking). I'd also check for reviews on that specific motherboard, which I presume you are.

BTW, I've had good experiences buying from PC Nut.

Finally, you could check out various reviews to see what kind of performance you get with different chips. There's a pretty good one on this site from Oct. 17 at:

<A HREF="http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/00q4/001017/index.html" target="_new">http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/00q4/001017/index.html</A>

Mike