cykosis's Full Review: AMD Duron, 1.3 GHz (D1300BOX) Boxed Processor
I just bought myself this Duron 800 and having done my homework, I was not surprised at the performance that I was able to squeeze out of it. This "value chip" can almost outperform a Pentium III clock for clock (meaning at the same speed) for a small fraction of the price. It shares many common properties with its 'big brother' the Thunderbird, except for its reduced L2 cache. They both come with 128k L1 cache but the Athlon has 256k L2 chache while the Duron comes with only 64k. On an Intel processor this would kill performance due to the engineering of its cache infrastructure, but with AMD's exclusive cache system it holds its own.
I would also like to mention another thing that makes this chip even more desirable to hardware tweakers. Paired with a good motherboard (I personally recommend Abit's KT7), you can overclock this chip to reach up to 25% higher speeds. Altering the Duron to allow it to overclock is a very simple procedure. In fact, right now I have mine running at a very nice 1050 mhz.
One thing to keep in mind when working with an overclocked, or even non-overclocked AMD chip is that it produces much more heat than any other processor on the market. For those that don't know, heat is a processors worst enemy. When installing the heatsink onto the processor, it is very important to get it right. An uncooled Duron or Thunderbird can literally fry itself to death in about 10 seconds.
All in all, this is a very good processor. You get great performance for a great price, leaving nothing to complain about.
Crucial Duron Specifications
- Built on an .18 micron process
- 100 mhz DDR Front Side Bus (200 mhz effective speed)
- 128k L1 cache running at core clock speed
- 64k on-die L2 cache running at core clock speed
- AMD exclusive cache architecture
- PGA (Flip Chip) base in a Socket A configuration
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