Introduction

With the introduction of the Thunderbird, AMD was able to once again overtake Intel in performance. Moving the cache to on-die lead way for greater performance, a smaller package, and reduced production costs. However, it also means a certain end for Slot-A processors. Most of the T-Bird and all of the Duron processors are supposed to be in Socket A format. A small number of Slot-A Thunderbird based Athlons were supposed to be delivered to OEM's only. However, a quick search on Pricewatch will show you that there are plenty of these processors available. This may be due to the fact that large OEM's have not elected to use the Slot-A version and have either chosen to use Socket-A or stay with systems based on the classic Athlon. In any case, it creates a great opportunity for existing Athlon owners to upgrade to the full-speed cache version. Ahh, but not so quickly. There are compatibility issues with the KX-133 chipset. Some people have had mixed results with certain boards. Not only does the manufacturer of the board make a difference, but it seems that even the quality of the board can cause issues. The most reliable KX-133 board with the Athlon seems to be the Asus K7V. But what about owners of the aging AMD-750 based boards? What kind of performance increase can one expect without the frills like AGP 4X and PC-133 memory? Well we ran a couple of benches and turned up the heat on this baby to see how far it would go.

The System

The board I used in the system was the tried and true Gigabyte 7IX. Although, I have had my problems with certain peripherals, this board has been very stable with the leaked beta BIOS F4a. F2 seems to cause problems with the L2 cache on the classic Athlons and Gigabyte has still to release an official update to the BIOS (I have absolutely no idea why).

The system had 128mb of Micron PC-133 memory, though only running at 100mhz. The video card was a Hercules 3D Prophet DDR-DVI, IN 2X MODE. While there are some compatibility problems, a simple registry entry will force the GeForce to run at 2X on Irongate boards. It may lock after an hour of Unreal Tournament but it ran 3DMark 2000 just fine.

I used a 650mhz .25mu Classic and 700mhz T-Bird for testing. The .25mu Classic was all I had so I was not able to hit the higher speeds with it. However, it was sufficient for comparison. I used the TD2 to overclock both the Classic and T-Bird Athlons. The settings are exactly the same for both processors except for the lower frequencies which become the higher frequencies for the T-Bird. For cooling I used an Alpha P7125 on the T-Bird and an Athlon Freezer on the Classic.

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