Pricing/compatibility/overclocking

Processor pricing

Here are the prices AMD is officially charging its distributors in quantities of 1,000:

Athlon XP Prices (US dollars)
XP 2100+	420
XP 2000+	339
XP 1900+	231
XP 1800+	188
XP 1700+	157
XP 1600+	130

As you can see, Athlon XP prices remain unchanged from the price cuts earlier this year. Instead, AMD has merely added the XP 2100+ to the top of their lineup and added a 19% price premium. Considering the 4% boost in clock speed, the XP 2100+ isn’t likely to win over many consumers looking for the best value, the 1900+ and 1800+ look considerably more attractive. Of course, if you frequent Price Watch you already know that AMD’s official processor pricing is considerably higher than street prices, with the Athlon XP 1800+ currently available as low as $124 and the Athlon XP 1900+ at $161. Meanwhile, the XP 2100+ can currently be found as low as $297. As supplies increase prices will drop, we also wouldn’t be surprised to see a price cut in the near future.

Compatibility

As the Athlon XP 2100+ is practically unchanged from the 2000+, motherboard compatibility problems should be kept to a minimum. The biggest issue would likely be the proper identification of the processor, rather than reporting the XP 2100 as an “XP 2100+”, the BIOS would instead report it as an “Athlon XP 1733MHz” when booting up the system. A simple BIOS upgrade will fix this issue.

For example, we tested the Athlon XP 2100+ with MSI’s K7T266 Pro2-RU. For the tests, we used MSI’s 3.4 BIOS, dated 1/30/02. Once we manually set the multiplier to 13.0x and the front-side bus to 133MHz, the K7T266 Pro2-RU properly identified our CPU as an Athlon XP 2100+ upon boot up.

In terms of cooling the Athlon XP 2100+, heatsinks that worked with the Athlon XP 2000+ will also work fine with the 2100+. Therefore, end users should be able to upgrade to the Athlon XP 2100+ with few hassles.

Overclocking

Our overclocking experience with the Athlon XP 2100+ was uneventful at best. While we were able to boot into Windows XP and run many applications at clock speeds as high as 1820MHz, stability wasn’t 100%. To achieve complete stability, we had to settle for 1781MHz (13.0x137), hardly anything to write home about when it comes to overclocking.