Features/Overclocking

First Impressions

As you can see in the picture below, our Duron 800 had a deep blue tint to it:

Our Duron 800

Previously, only Athlon processors manufactured at AMD's fabrication facility in Dresden, Germany used this color in their polish.

Since Dresden is the only facility manufacturing gigahertz Athlon's with copper interconnect technology, many Duron owners with blue cores assumed their processor was manufactured with copper interconnects in Dresden. However, this is not the case. All Duron processors are still manufactured with aluminum interconnects at Fab 25 in Austin, Texas.

Quick specs

Like the previous Durons, the Duron 800MHz requires a core voltage of 1.6V and still runs on a 100MHz double data rate front side bus, equivalently performing at 200MHz. The clock multiplier has been raised to 8.0x, the only feature changed from previous Durons. Here's a quick rundown of the Duron's specs:

Socket A interface
0.18-micron manufacturing process
25 million transistors on a 100mm^2 die
128K L1 cache, 64K full-speed L2 cache
Fully-pipelined, superscalar floating point engine
200MHz system bus
Enhanced 3DNow! Instructions

In the future, AMD plans to unveil their enhanced, low-power core (built on a more advanced 0.18-micron process) to replace today's Duron CPU. Codenamed Morgan, this CPU is also rumored to sport 128K of Level 2 cache but still run on AMD's 200MHz EV6 bus. This enhanced processor should compete directly against Intel's upcoming 100MHz bus Celerons, which should start at 800MHz.

Overclocking

So far, we've been lucky enough to have great overclocking success with every Duron processor in our possession. For instance, James took his Duron 600 up to 950 in his upgrade guide, while I hit the 1GHz mark last month with a Duron 700. In fact, that same Duron now runs great at 1,050MHz!

With these successes in mind, we were eager to see what our Duron 800 could do. Since we'd obtained 1GHz before, we went straight for this mark with the Duron 800, and thankfully it completed all tests without a hiccup. We next gave 1,050MHz a try and were greeted with the Windows desktop when the system suddenly crashed. We slowly dropped the system bus in 1MHz increments with our KT7-RAID before finally settling at 102MHz. As a result, our final clock speed was 1,020MHz (10.0x102) at 1.825V. Under load the system ran up to 115 degrees Fahrenheit, typical operating temperature for one of our overclocked Duron rigs.

In any case, while the results weren't as good as our 700MHz Duron, we were very pleased with the overclocking potential of this processor. If we had to choose between the 600, 700, or 800MHz Duron though, we'd probably go with the 700. After all, it offers a great combination of price/performance.

Editor's Note: There were some untrue rumors floating around that AMD has removed the pins necessary to unlock the CPU. Our sample overclocked just fine once we connected the L1 bridges on the top of the processor.