AMD's Latest Thunderbird: SocketA Athlon at 1.1 GHz

The Tests

I decided to run this new CPU against its slower brothers, against Intel's Pentium III and against Duron and Celeron. All CPUs had to be faster than 900 MHz though, which required Duron and Celeron to be overclocked.

For all AMD processors I used a SocketA platform with VIA's Apollo KT133 chipset from Asus, the A7V . The recent BIOS update 1003 produced a surprising performance gain, particularly under Sysmark. All Intel processors were run on an i815-platform, the Asus CUSL2 .

I was unable to include benchmark results of a Pentium III 1.13 GHz, as I am not in the possession of a sample that works reliably. I also would have had to run it on Intel's customized VC820 motherboard, which would have made this CPU look rather sad against its brother at 1 GHz on a i815 platform. Believe me, you don't miss anything.

A Celeron 667 was overclocked to 950 MHz on the CUSL2, which happened to be a very easy job. The latest BIOS 1002beta2 from Asus' FTP-server gives you the option to directly choose the processor clock and it automatically adjusts FSB, memory and PCI clock for you. At 950 MHz the Celeron 667 ran with 95 MHz FSB, 142 MHz memory clock and a hefty 47 MHz PCI clock, which surprisingly didn't cause any problems whatsoever. Thanks to the high memory clock the Celeron 950 performed rather impressively.

For the Duron 900 and 950 I overclocked a Duron 700 using the dipswitch overclocking feature of the Asus A7V. I am aware of the fact that overclocking Durons has become much more difficult these days and we will dedicate a new article to this topic very soon. The Athlon 1100 needed to have its L1-bridges closed in order to be overclocked to 1150 MHz. You will notice that the Athlon 1100 overclocked to 1150 MHz was never able to pass the Linux kernel compilation. This is the only test that the overclocked CPU was unable to finish. It shows that the kernel compilation is a very good test to check if your overclocked processor runs reliably. I was unable to overclock my 1 GHz Pentium III to anything more than 1035 MHz, which is hardly worth talking about, and so I omitted the results of this 3%-overclocking.

I compared the processors under Windows98 using Sysmark2000, Quake 3 Arena, Unreal Tournament, 3D Studio Max 2 and SPECviewperf 6.1.2. Additionally all CPUs had to finish a timed Linux kernel compilation.