At The Last Second: AMD's Trump Card - The Athlon XP 2600+

Power With The Athlon XP 3400+ And 2666 MHz

The Athlon XP 2600+ runs stably at 2666 MHz - this corresponds to an Athlon XP 3400+.

In our last test of the previous Athlon XP 2200+ with Thoroughbred "A," we concluded the following:

"...our attempt to overclock the processor's FSB to 148 MHz, similar to the Athlon XP 2100+ (Palomino), failed. Here, it should be mentioned that both systems were operated with a high-quality watercooling setup. The result: the system remained stable only at 140 MHz FSB, meaning that the CPU clock was increased to 1890 MHz. This is an increase of 5%, which is clearly a weaker result than with the older Palomino, which ran with perfect stability at 1918 MHz (11.2% increase)."

Speed, thanks to 166 MHz FSB - the Athlon XP runs with 2666 MHz.

Good cooling allows the CPU to remain quite cold.

The situation has now changed entirely: the THG lab in Munich succeeded in overclocking the Athlon XP 2600+ (2133 MHz) with the Thoroughbred "B" core to the extreme. Together with the best watercooling system available on the market (see The Third THG Video: Silent and Ice Cold ), the new Athlon XP, with 150 MHz FSB (instead of the factory-set 133 MHz) and an increased core voltage of 1.90 Volt (instead of the factory-set 1.625 Volt) could be overclocked to a true 2400 MHz . This clock rate corresponds to the model number (or "P" rating) of an Athlon XP 3000+.

However, we still wanted to know what the absolute limits of the processor were. To this end, we used a special cooling technique to keep the CPU die temperature to -41 degrees Celsius.

To sum up: the Athlon XP ran completely stably with a 166 MHz FSB clock and a core voltage of 2.20 Volt. The resulting clock speed is 2666 MHz, which corresponds to the model number of an Athlon XP 3400+. Further details can be found in the benchmark results. We could only attain the absolute record for a short time: the Athlon X with Thoroughbred "B" ran at an FSB clock of 175 MHz and a clock speed of 2800 MHz - which would correspond to an Athlon XP 3600+...

Data on the overclocked Athlon XP 3400+.