Conclusion
After this highly successful story, which looks extremely promising as well as so much easier than what Athlon-overclocking used to be before, we've got all reason to welcome AMD's new processors even more. Here are the facts why:
- With a full-featured SocketA motherboard the overclocking of Duron and Athlon/Thunderbird should be a piece of cake.
- As you could see in the excerpts of the data sheets above, it seems extremely unlikely that AMD could revoke this 'overclockability' of the two SocketA-processors easily. As long as the SIP-protocol initializes those two processors we've got no reasons to worry. A change of that would require a serious redesign of both processors.
- Duron 650 and Duron 700 seem to go up to 950 MHz, which increases performance significantly. Even Intel's fastest Celeron processors are hardly able to reach 1 GHz and even if they should, they are still slower than a Duron overclocked to 950 MHz.
- Thunderbird can go up to 1.1 GHz, which is the highest clock speed that we have tested on any processor so far. With some additional cooling Thunderbird might reach even more. Intel's Pentium III is just about able to reach a few MHz more than 1 GHz if you are extremely lucky. Thus AMD is ahead of Intel once more.
Well, I hope that all overclockers are pleased with the outcome of this article. There isn't really much that should keep any of you from going for one of those two new AMD processors. The only problem that I can see right now is the shortage of SocketA-motherboards with VIA's Apollo KT133 chipset. In a few weeks the situation should improve significantly. I am sure that most motherboard makers will follow Asus' example and include overclocking features into their SocketA-solutions.
AMD might hate this article, but I feel that it supplied the final reason why virtually anyybody should be happy with the latest AMD processors now. The wind that blows into Intel's face has become another bit stronger ...
Please follow-up by reading the article Overclocking AMD's Socket Processors
