AMD's Thunderbird finally fully fledged

The Chipsets

For the time being, the choice of chipsets for the new Thunderbird isn't big. AMD announced proudly that their rather old and almost outdated 750 chipset is able to support Thunderbird, but the much newer Apollo KX133 chipset from VIA seems to have problems with the new AMD processor. Therefore VIA created the Apollo KT133, which is nothing different, than a KX133-chipset with SocketA-support, so please don't expect any new features. KT133 was recently renamed after from 'KZ133', because the combination 'KZ' is in bad memory to millions of people worldwide.

AMD is currently working on the successor of the 750 chipset, which will carry the 'surprising' name 'AMD 760'. This chipset is expected to support DDR-SDRAM, which is why there are high expectations into systems that come with Thunderbird and the new AMD chipset. Obviously we should not expect those new platforms before August or even September 2000.

Test Motherboards For Thunderbird

By the time of the test we had three different SocketA-motherboards with VIA's Apollo KT133 chipset available for our 1 GHz Thunderbird. One was the motherboard out of the official AMD evaluation system, which turned out to be an OEM-product from Compaq by the name of 'Pipeline-1', of which we heard the rumor that it is manufactured by Asus.

Unfortunately this board wouldn't leave any room whatsoever for any kind of tweaking, which is not exactly surprising for an OEM-product. We weren't even able to adjust the memory timing.

The second motherboard came directly from VIA and is the official KT133 reference platform VT5276D. Our tests showed that this board would produce the best results, which is why we used it for our testing suite.

Finally we had the chance to try MSI's K7T Pro. This board seemed to be in a too early stage for testing, because the results it scored could not live up to its competitors from above.

Benchmark Setup

As in the recent Solano-article we made sure that our test results were comparable to the scores produced for the 'Giga-Battle ' article, which is why we used NVIDIA's rev. 5.08 drivers once more. It is still a fact that all later drivers are slower than revision 508, which is why we felt good about using it.