Which is best for overclocking, Athlon or Duron?

[jspenc3]

I'm thinking of upgrading, and want to know which will overclock and generally run faster/better. The Athlon or Duron. Thinking of buying one in the 750-800mhz range and getting it as close to 1ghz as possible. Probably go with the Abit or Asus motherboard. Also, does the ATA100 give a big increase over ATA66? Thanks everyone for the input...

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-Jay

[Greebe]

Both cpu's are roughly equal in their ability to overclock. The Athlon doesn't have the cache limitions of the Duron (budget) cpu and proforms better.

There is relatively no difference between ata 66 and 100 interface speeds. Just get a solid, fast, high quality drive (IBM?

[jspenc3]

That's what I thought. Are there different Athlon chips? A friend can get me a 750 Athlon setup for about the same total price as a Duron setup because the mobo is more for the Duron (both Asus boards). Are some versions of Athlon more overclockable or different (cheaper?). Also guess I won't worry about the ata100 for now. That should save some $$ too...

Thanks again!

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-Jay

[Greebe]

Which Athlons are you refering to, the original SlotA (Athlon classic) or the new SocketA Athlon (Thunderbird)? SocketA motherboards will run both the Duron and the Tbirds.

I have yet to see any real difference in pricing between UDMA33, ATA66 or ATA100. I'd get the 100.

[jspenc3]

Hmm. I don't know which motherboard/processor combos he was talking about. But I bet it was a slotA original Athlon and Asus MB, or a Duron with a socketA MB. Would the original Athlon/MB be cheaper? Is there any other difference than the socket type? As for the UDMA, I think the Asus A7K (?) only had 66, to get UDMA 100 which MoBo would be best (& cheapest?).

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-Jay

[Himself]

If you ever want to upgrade to a new cpu, get the socket A motherboard. On socket A, bang for buck the Duron is a better deal, the TBird is marginally faster naturally in some things with the extra cache.

[jspenc3]

So the Tbird is faster than the original Athlon? And slotA is on the way out? (Replaced by socketA across the board?) I'll probably end up with the Duron, especially if it's one of the original Athlons (and they're not making more slotA's...)

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-Jay

[Wombat]

Yes, the Tbird is generally faster than the original Athlon. No, the Slot A isn't on its way out, it IS out. No reason to buy one now, the chips are even more expensive b/c of demand from folks with older motherboards.
Duron's overclock better than Tbirds b/c the smaller cache generally handles it better. Get a Duron and OC it, all the gaming results I've seen show that the difference between Tbird and Duron (same clock) are about the same as a 50MHz speed difference, so save your money and just run a faster Duron.

[Sir Hitech]

As far as crunching Seti, does the TBird's have significant advantage over Duron's? I understand that the new clients utilize less cache, am I correct?

Thanks

[Marshmallowman]

since they are very similar designs they have similar overclockability.
But:
the duron has a smaller cache, which gives it a samller die, which in turn results in less heat being produced by the chip, so it would be easier to overclock in the sense that it produces less heat.
Having said that a thunderbird dome of which use the copper interconnect technolgy whic has better electrical characteristics and produces less heat(and may be more stable due to the better conductivity of copper).

As to peformance its all to do with cache size, and program that does not overflow there caches will produce similar perfomance
(exception being the slower l2 cache on the original athlon slows it some what).
But with certain applications as the cache begins to overflow the thunderbird pulls ahead, and then the original athlon can begin to lead in performance, but eventually as the cacheabilty reduces(cache misses becomes to high) all three processors tend to produce the same perfomance.
so each processor has its sweet spot.
But the duron never exceeds the perfomance of the thunderbird, but will beat the original athlon in some particular benchmarks

Well thats my opinion,.. and I done't even own a duron or athlon (Yet!!)

[Marshmallowman]

oh, and good thunderbirds can reach 1.2G and slightlty over.(may be due to the copper thunderbird?)
I have not heard of any duron (without exotice coolong) reaching anything over 1.0G(stable).

[spoogenet]

jspenc3,

Just a few comments.

1. Don't give into the MHz temptation. Go with what works best for what you will be doing. If you need absolute performance, and don't care about cost, then the Tbird is probably your choice. If you want bang-for-your-buck, then go with the Duron. And pay close attention to the benchmarks, what they measure, and how reliable the source is. It's too easy to massage numbers.

2. Copper interconnects mean a few different things. They mean higher conductivity than aluminum, which is good. However bear in mind that copper interconnects are necessary due to other effects. Al interconnects work fine for larger processes. For a 0.25 um process then Al will do fine, yeah, Cu will maybe run a little cooler and overall probably won't make a huge difference. Cu is necessary due to smaller traces used to make your chips. When the process goes down to 0.18 um and 0.13 um, the Cu is pretty much necessary. It also is more resistant to electromigration, meaning a higher lifetime of the chip than one with Al.

But anyways, that aside, a smaller process with Cu will run cooler than a larger process, or an equal process with Al. However bear in mind that the only reason they're using the smaller processes is to crank them up to higher speeds, meaning more power. It doesn't necessarily run a whole bunch cooler because now you're cranking up the clock. You're not comparing apples to apples anymore.

Just my $0.02.

b

[This message has been edited by spoogenet (edited 15 November 2000).]

[jspenc3]

Ok, so is there a point where the Duron (& tbird) switched to copper? Are there certain chips I should look for over 700. I'd like to get as much (performance) from it as possible, but price isn't the only concern (just an important one). I'm probably going the Duron route, but should I get the 700 or 750 or something else to maximize performance/overclobability/price (in that order)?

Also, still no replies on which MB is best and if I should wait for the new DDR SDRAM? How about that Mushkin 150mhz ram? Is that noticably better than 133?

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-Jay

[Indiana]

The TBirds are available in blue (copper) and green (aluminium) tint so if you're going for a TBird, it's easy to spot the copper ones, just take a blue one.
Durons are said to be only available in aluminium, even though there are ones with blue tint here as well: some or all 800MHz Durons.

I'd still go with a Duron, the performance hit to a equally clocked TBird is less than 10% for most real-world tests (even smaller for a lot of benchmarks due to them being operated fully in both chips cache) while the price is a lot lower - at least here in germany where e.g. a Duron700 costs ~DM200 while the TBird is sold for ~DM350: That's 90% of the performance for 57% of the price - not bad, I'd say.
IMHO it's only reasonable buying a TBird when you want to have a top-speed system but don't like oc'ing, since the Durons are available only up to 800MHz. If you don't mind oc'ing your system, go for the Duron.

I have a (blue) Duron800 myself and it oc's exceptionally well: it boots into DOS and runs DOS-programs at up to 1.1GHz (1.85V core-voltage), but it won't start windows that fast. At 1075MHz windows runs but heavy 3D-apps/benches (3D-Fake2000, Q-III) are prone to cause lockups.
At 1055MHz (multiplier 9.5, FSB 111) the system was totally stable running the distributed.net client over more than two days, but the CPU got quite hot (55°C) when 100% in use for a long time.
I reduced the FSB clock a bit (9.5*109MHz = 1036MHz) and the core voltage to 1.8V. Now the CPU runs at ~40°C under 2D-use (Office, IE,...) and reaches 47° with constant 100% use.

BTW, I only have a "standard" SocketA cooler, not one of these crazy (and expensive) oc'ers items.

[This message has been edited by Indiana (edited 15 November 2000).]

[Indiana]

I forgot: the used mainboard was an Abit KT7-RAID, IMHO the best and fastest (How's 550MB/sec ALU and 630MB/sec FPU mem-speed in Sandra ) socketA board you can get.

I'd also take the RAID version, it's more than worth the extra price - having installed a RAID-array of two IBM DTLA-307030 HD just five days ago, resulting in a speed of 44MB/s (again SiSoft Sandra), it's just great for capturing video with my WinTV

No (apparent) IRQ-problems with the RAID enabled here in Win98SE and 2k with my other hardware (G400DH/16MB, Hauppauge WinTV, AVM Fritz! card, SBLive!, Initio UW-SCSI) but I've read posts about problems with some NICs, so you might fist want to check this.