Slot A Thunderbirds? The real thing?

[Guest]

I recently saw on pricewatch that there's a section for SLOT A Thunderbirds... ex. site

http://www.axiontech.com/cgi-local/prdtinfo.asp?prdt=PRAMAT800TO

Does anyone know if these things are stable and real w/o going to a KT133? I have a KX-133 Elements board (a dang Jetway imitation) w/ 800mhz Athlon (nothing modified) usually 95-105 deg. F [closed system], 192 pc133 Crucial Cas2, 3d Prophet Geforce DDR-DVI, Pioneer 16x dvd, SB Live Xgamer, internal 250 zip, 3com 905 NIC, 3com/usr 56k x2 voice hardware, 20 gig 7200 rpm 2mb buffer maxtor, (later getting yamaha 16/10/40 cd-rw),floppy, dual fan hard drive cooler, system exhaust fan, (no system ball bearing fan b/c it gets hotter w/ one...), 3 ball bearing hsf for cpu with power on a generic 250w power supply. Im thinkin about either getting a gfd to get it to 1ghz or get a 800 SLOT A Thunderbird. Which is better, and will the power supply handle it at a gig (i sometimes add in a slave drive and its fine). If the gfd idea is better...which one can i get 200mhz more with what i got at the cheapest price without dying on me or killing anything.

Thanx

 

[Guest]

Slot A thunderbirds won't work with the "Classic Athlon" KX133 chipset. You need the Kt133 for it to run reliably at all.

If you're looking to upgrade, try an Asus K7V w/ a Duron 800mhz. The 800 should OC to 1ghz with np. They're fairly cheap too, you're talking $200-ish for the combo.

At the same time though, do you /really/ need an upgrade? I'd rather put my $ into Cable, or DSL... Maybe a few pizza's. An 800mhz Athlon system with a GF DDR will haul ass just groovy. You don't need to upgrade right away
I'd honestly wait for Micron's new Chipsets - coming out in about 4-8 months.
Supports DDR RAM, The new Morgan's and Palominos (Upgrades to Duron and TBird), and the damn chipset comes with an 8 meg "e-cache". That thing will fargin haul!

That's what I've got my money on, anyway.

Hasta,

-Ryu

 

[soup20000]

Yes thats real. The slot A thunderbirds work with both the 750 and KX133. Alot of the KX mobo's had problems with the Slot Thunderbird and would not run them. Most of the 750 mobo's will run them fine but need a BIOS update.

soup.

AMD for Life!

 

[Guest]

They <b>were</b> made but not in huge numbers, while the industry switched from Slot A to Socket A. However, I don't think they're being made any more. To find out which type you've got, you can use WCPUID, the giveaway being the size and mutliplier of the L2 cache. For a classic, it's either 0.5x/512KB or 0.3x/512KB. For the Thunderbird, it's 1.0x/256KB.

I just wish someone would dissect one of these chips so we can have AMD Slockets like Intel Slockets for the new Thunderbirds and Durons.

If you do find one of these chips, flash your bios to the latest version before installing it.

 

[FUGGER]

Generic PSU?? Not a wise choice

 

[Grizely1]

Actually it's not a multiplier for the cache, but infact a divider. Like (this is just an example) the Classic Athlons 500-700 have a divider of 1/3, 750-900 have 1/2, and 950+ has 2/3 (whereas the dividend refers to the CPU clock speed, for example a 600 would have a cache divider of 1/3, so the Cache speed is 1/3 of 600 which is 200MHz.)

 

[Guest]

Ok..thanks for the notes...really appreciate it. So no recommendations for the Slot A t-bird, where and which gfd would do get me another 200mhz? Just want to do a minor jump and saving up to buy another puter in a few years before these parts run out. And would the generic 250w psu that came w/ my case be causing my computer to lock up right when my desktop appears, restarting itself once in awhile, blue screens at startup something about vxd bad or misaddress of cache..an somethin about making the number bigger in my sys.ini (my 386 swap file is usually 153 or 192 megs...pretty big),and plenty of bluescreens for Counter-strike (a half-life game)? Either that or i think its Win 98 SE. If so ill probably go with the Enermax 350w that has dual fans which can also assist cooling the processor. Thanks again guys!

 

[Guest]

I hate to pick hairs, but dividing by 1.5 is just as valid as multiplying by 2/3, and multiplying by 1/2 is the same as dividing by 2. Please don't flame me, I am only English

 

[Grizely1]

I know, but in reality it's dividing. It's politically correct, you could say. Just like the AGP and PCI bus in relation to the FSB, 1/3 and 2/3, you don't see .33 or .66.