Athlon XPs In The Test
Palomino, Thoroughbred,Thoroughbred-B, Barton.
Currently, there are three AMD Athlon models that come into question, namely the Thoroughbred, Thoroughbred-B and the Barton core. It has become difficult to understand the number of available models and their actual clock rates though. Models with 133-, 166- and 200 MHz FSB are in the stores, and all of them are called "Athlon XP."
This is not very important for our tests with the XP-TMC, however. For this article, we used one of the latest motherboards with NVIDIA's nForce2 Ultra 400 chipset (Asus A7N8X 2.0). In order to test the basic functionality on old boards as well, we also used an MSI KT4 Ultra (KT400) and an 8KHA+ (KT266). Here, we have only positive things to report, because even the relatively new Barton could be used with the 8KHA+ from Epox with the KT266A chipset. The highest multiplier attainable is x17, and with it we were able to reach a clock speed of 2.26 GHz at 133 MHz FSB.
We used an Athlon XP 3200+ with the Barton core for all of the tests. Because we were able to change the multiplier as well as the FSB clock, we could get the benchmark scores for the "smaller" models, too.
