Heat/Compatibility

Heat

Before we get into the benchmarks, we'd like to take a moment to discuss cooling both of these new chips from AMD. To date, the only heatsink validated, tested, and approved for use at 1.3GHz to press folks like us was manufactured by Foxconn, part number PK0451AEDAUFB. Thanks to the fine folks at Foxconn we were able to get our hands on a few of these units and noted that they cooled our existing processors much better than the Taisol units we'd previously used. Since the screwdriver clip is a bit smaller than the units from Taisol, the Foxconn heatsink is a bit more difficult to work with, but the procedure to install/remove the heatsink is essentially the same.

Our Foxconn heatsink

Foxconn's 1.3GHz cooler on the left, our old Taisol unit on right

Recently, AMD also officially approved Taisol's latest heatsink, part number S001126-2 (information on this unit is not available on their website) but we haven't had the chance to test it. Units from the likes of Alpha, Coolermaster, Global Win, and Thermaltake will likely be approved in time, but keep in mind that at this time, the Foxconn unit is the one recommended by AMD's validation unit.

The clip on the Taisol unit (on the right) is much easier to use

Compatibility

Right now you're probably wondering how we were able to get the 13.0 multiplier working on our ABIT KT7A-RAID and FIC AD11 motherboards. Since both motherboards only support multipliers up to 12.5x, it wouldn't seem like either motherboard would support our 1.3GHz processor.

However, after conferring with an engineer at ABIT, we discovered that the 12.5x setting on our KT7A actually uses the multiplier present on the CPU itself. This feature was implemented for compatibility with future processors. For instance, if AMD were to introduce a 1.5GHz Thunderbird (15.0x100), all we'd have to do is dial in a clock multiplier of 12.5x and set the bus speed to 100MHz to ensure the proper settings for this processor.

When booting up our KT7A-RAID motherboard with the 12.5x100 setting, the motherboard properly ran the system at 13x100, resulting in a clock speed of 1300MHz. We then attempted to confirm this in both WCPUID and SiSoft Sandra, but both programs incorrectly reported the bus speed at 104 and the clock multiplier at 12.5. Our source at ABIT believes both programs guess the setting for the bus speed since the software only divides the clock speed by the clock multiplier setting on the motherboard. This is nothing new, minor errors such as this crop up often when companies release new chipsets or CPUs the software is unfamiliar with.

So what's the moral of the story? If you happen to purchase one of these 1.3GHz processors in the near term, go ahead and manually adjust your BIOS to 12.5x100, or better yet, be on the lookout for upcoming BIOS' that natively support both processors.