08/01/00 By: Jack Kolesar
Introduction
It has been just over a year since AMD announced their new line
of Athlon processors with "Performance Enhancing Cache". The new
Socket-A design with on-die cache improved performance and left a lot of headroom
for increased processor speeds. Because of a tight manufacturing process and
excellent yields, the 0.18mu line of processors has increased in MHz rapidly.
Today, we look at the latest offering from AMD, the 1400MHz AMD Athlon.
The CPU itself comes in two flavors. a 200MHz FSB version and
the 266MHz FSB bigger brother. The latter is the one in our possession. The
processor came factory unlocked, as I think all of the 1400/266 parts are,
with a default core voltage of 1.75V. The sample, provided my Monarch,
is a Week 23 AYHJA. This is the newer stepping code that was introduced just
before the release of the 1.4GHz. Overclocking reports place this revision
very high, second only to the AYHJAR which seems to have surfaced just recently.
Other than the increased processor speed, there are no major improvements
with newest addition to the Athlon family.
Issues
When I first installed the CPU, I had major stability issues.
The system would crash constantly even at the default core speed. At first,
I thought it may be a heat issue as this CPU gets VERY hot. I tried several
different HSFs but it didn't solve the problem. Going into the BIOS, I reset
the defaults and Boom....It was fixed. Yes, sometimes I get so wrapped up
in something that in the process, I overlook the obvious. After all was well,
I went back into the BIOS and tweaked out again. Everything ran fine after.
I am still not sure what setting may have been locking it up, if any. It may
have just been corrupted.
Performance and Overclocking
I ran the CPU at a number of different speeds all at the default
voltage and at 266MHz FSB DDR. I was able to achieve a stable overclock of
1.53GHz with no added voltage. At 1.6GHz and 1.85V the CPU got way too hot
and was not perfectly stable so I did not include it in the benchmarks. I
do believe that it will run at 1.6GHz with a little more cooling. I plan on
placing my MC-462 on the unit but am currently too lazy to remove the motherboard
again to add the mounting posts. Instead I used a 7000RPM Dragon Orb III by
Thermaltake. The motherboard was an Abit KT7A-RAID with 256MB of PC-133. You
will notice that the gaming benchmarks are rather lousy. That is due to my
pitiful GeForce I DDR board. This will hopefully be upgraded to GF3 pretty
soon.
On to the Benchmarks------->
