Hardware Question

[CyberSurfer]

I read an article on www.arstechnica.com recently which was reviewing the AMD Duron processor. The Duron is not easily overclockable, for reasons which I've forgotten. The article seemed to suggest that the only way by which the author could overclock his Duron was by increasing the FSB speed on his MoBo. The motherboard I have (which will hold a Duron) has a default FSB Speed of 100Mhz. If I increase this to 133MHz to allow my PC133 RAM to run at full speed, is it going to automatically overclock my Duron processor? Or did I just mis-understand the article?


The article can be found here: http://www.arstechnica.com/reviews/2...n/duron-1.html


TIA!!

[chrisjk]

I believe so. The speed of the processor is usually arsed about with using a combination of the FSB speed and the multiplier on the mobo. Adjustments upwards on either of these would increase core CPU speed. Unfortunately, my Intel mobo prehibits overclocking. I tried it once on a 350 Pent II (tried to take it to 400) and it refused to boot.

[CyberSurfer]

Thanks Chris!

That sucks, though...I might have to stick to 100MHz FSB....Having said that, however, a mate of mine overclocked a 600MHz Duron to 900MHz and it runs stably, so it may not be too bad...Any idea what a 33MHz FSB speed increase might increase the core CPU speed by? I can't change the Clock Multiplier on my MoBo...

[chrisjk]

I wouldn't recommend a third increase in speed, but if it runs stable, hell why not. However it's probably slowly frying itself.

100 to 133 should be fine, esp for AMD cpu's which are overclockers' favourites. Word of advice before you take the plunge; Make sure you can afford to shell out for a new processor and/or anything else should it go up in flames - you'd be pretty pissed if you couldn't!!

[CyberSurfer]

Cool!

A 750MHz Duron is only £53, so it's not too much trouble to replace...That's a pretty fair price for an Athlon Thunderbird with 64K of L2Cache instead of 256...Pretty damn good indeed!!

[chrisjk]

Holy smoke man, where is that from? 53 squid sounds good to me.

[CyberSurfer]

Anywhere! Jungle.com and Dabs.com quote roughly the same price....Check out the benchmarks in that article I posted the link to...The Duron 700 is shown out-performing 800Mhz Celerons, 700Mhz Pentium IIIs and 500Mhz Athlon (original)s!!!

[chrisjk]

I'm ganna bag me one of those beauties!!

[CyberSurfer]

And the really good thing is, Socket A motherboards will handle Athlon Thunderbirds and Durons, as they are essentially the same processor. So one of these days, I'll upgrade my 750MHz Duron to a 1Ghz Athlon without replacing my MoBo....