AMD's Thunderbird finally fully fledged

SlotA Thunderbird

We were in the lucky situation to get a SlotA-version of Thunderbird as well. Officially those will be unavailable to the retail channel and only go to selected OEM-customers. We tried the processor in an Asus K7V with the latest BIOS and found out that this Thunderbird 750 ran without a glitch. However, the overclocking of this CPU was rather unsuccessful. Although the Goldfinger devices work fine with this processor, it was impossible to even overclock it reliably to 800 MHz. This could be due to our sample, but it also could be that the rumor saying that SlotA-Thunderbirds at 800 MHz and above aren't able to run on KX133-platforms reliably has got some truth to it. We will dedicate some more time to this issue and will keep you informed about our findings. We'll also try to find an answer to the question if SocketA-Thunderbirds are able to run in SlotA-systems with special 'Slocket-Cards'. So far AMD stated that those SocketA-to-SlotA cards would not work reliably.

You can see that the SlotA-Thunderbird looks very similar to its older brother, besides the fact that it's missing the L2-cache chips. Goldfinger devices work just the same as well.