AMD Releases Duron 850

Overclocking Of Duron

In terms of overclocking Duron is also way better than its wannabe competitor from Intel. All Durons from 800 MHz upward run reliably at 1000 MHz and that without taking the risk of beyond-spec bus and AGP clocks as required for Celeron. This is why for overclockers the Duron 850 is a rather uninteresting product. Even the first Duron processors could easily be overclocked to 850 MHz and more. Only speeds of beyond 1000 MHz are virtually impossible to reach with AMD's low-cost processor, as we saw in our tests with the Vapochill cooling solution. Even at sub-zero temperatures Duron would hardly go higher than 1050 MHz.

For owners of SocketA motherboards with built-in overclock features the Duron processor only needs to have its L1-bridges shortened, which can easily be done with a thin pencil. After shortening the bridges and a test run to see if the multiplier can be adjusted to different settings it is wise to secure the thin pencil lines with some tape and the overclocking can begin. If the motherboard doesn't support the alteration of Duron's 1.6 V supply voltage you can additionally shorten the two open L7-bridges as well to reach 1.85 V.

SocketA-Motherboards that don't support overclocking make the story a bit more difficult. Here the easiest way is to additionally shorten all L6-bridges and then solder some wires to the BP_FID pins on the motherboard and connect them to either ground or Vcc according to the BP_FID settings for the required multiplier. This lets you alter the multiplier up to x11, which is more than enough for Duron processors.

Finally there are now SocketA-motherboards becoming available that support 133 MHz processor bus clock. Duron does not officially support this new bus clock yet, but it works just fine. A Duron overclocked to 1000/133 MHz will give you improved performance over a Duron overclocked to 1000/100 MHz.