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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DRBES who wrote (98145)	3/12/2000 10:56:00 AM
From: Dan3	Respond to of 1583681

Nice review of the Athlon 900 at: amdzone.com ..... conclusion: ...Now to wrap it all up. The 900MHz is fast, period. It is not the fastest Athlon available, but it also won't cost you as much. It also gives you some breathing room for overclocking. Mine got to 1030MHz, an increase of 14.4%, without any sort of tweaking of the cooling. I just slapped on a heatsink and fired it up. As I mentioned since mine has the 2/5 cache divisor, and the shipping 900 will have a 1/3 it may in fact be easier to overclock. The L2 cache speed is really my greatest concern. I have a pretty good feeling that at lot of these will be able to run at a 2/5 divisor. It will all depend on the speed of the cache chips you happen to get. Until they come out in quantity and people start cracking them open it will be hard to tell. If I were going to buy one of the three Athlons announced I would definitely pick the 900, and I'll tell you why. First off you can save yourself a good deal of cash by choosing it. Secondly, I doubt that the cores will be much different in actual top speeds obtainable. Third, if you get a 1GHz you don't have much room for overclocking. From the boards I tested it with, AMD 750 based, and Via KX133 based, the highest speed you could obtain in theory with the 750 based boards would be 10.5X119 and 10.5X115. That comes out to 1250 and 1207MHz respectively. Now I have my doubts that those speeds would be obtainable. I'll have to do more testing as time permits, but the point is on current boards paired with a GHz Athlon, you are running out of overclocking room. My biggest beefs with the 900 is that the L2 cache speed is slower and that it takes up a large percentage more power, and there for releases much more heat than it's model 2 predecessors. The good thing about model 2, or .18 micron Athlons when they were released was that they stressed motherboards and power supplies less since they demanded less power. With the introduction of these new Athlons we are once again creeping up to higher power consumption. Now the L2 cache speed problem is out of AMD's hands with the current Athlons. They can't make the SRAM, and they have been hurt by the lack of higher speeds. Thunderbird is the answer with the on die full speed cache, but we will just have to wait a few more months for it. All in all the 900 is a fine CPU. You can't fault AMD for the L2 cache, and for releasing it sooner to keep ahead in the MHz race. Who knows, a few months down the line it may be the overclocker's Slot A CPU of choice. Dan