Overclocking :

Unfortunately the Duron didn't get to me until late Friday so, with a busy weekend already planned the overclocking had to take a back seat. Initial impressions suggest that either I got a turkey or that the overclocking potential of the new Duron isn't huge. With a little playing I got her to 1404MHz air cooled and with a little voltage tweaking but stability was far from ideal and in the end I had to settle for a stable 1378MHz, not earth shattering, but free! AMD changed the core revision from rev 0 to rev 1 when they introduced the 1.2 which suggested revision 0 had run its course, but with Morgan expected to reach 1.5GHz before the switch to Appaloosa I was hoping to find a little more headroom. I'm not going to draw any definite conclusions until I have more time to play with the settings, but so far this particular Duron isn't setting any overclocking records.

Conclusion :

AMD are never happy walking in Intel's shadow, and the 1.3GHz Duron yet again demonstrates their commitment towards driving innovation, choice and value for money through even the value segments of the market. The Duron has always been a strong performer amongst its peers but the introduction of the Morgan core and now the jump to 1.3GHz leaves you feeling the Duron is finally coming of age. The problem with value focused processors has always been the feeling that you were compromising so much in the name of saving money, but the 1.3 actually feels as though very little would break its stride, a strangely uneasy feeling when you remember what you've got sat in your socket. That doesn't mean it's going to run every recent title at 1600x1200 with the detail maxed out, but it does mean the setting you end up using will probably be high enough to not leave you feeling cheated......or cheap!

For a processor tied to a 100MHz (200MHz internal) bus and only half the L2 cache, the Duron pulls off a real master stroke at being able to approach the performance found on clock-similar traditional Athlons, and though the lack of bandwidth is evident in certain tests, the more efficient core eats up some of this shortfall.

Much as I'd like to see a 266MHz version of the Duron, this would probably bring it a little too close to Athlon performance levels for comfort and we may just have to wait for Appaloosa before we see this move. As with the XP2000+ though, AMD are now running the upper limit of the multiplier spectrum found on most boards and if they stick with a 100MHz fsb, then there are a large number of boards out there that will need a BIOS upgrade to access the needed 14x multiplier needed for a 1.4GHz part, and of course there will be a great many boards that simply won't manage that transition at all.

These are indeed exciting times when even the tightest of budgets can figure a 1.3GHz processor into their system cost calculations without pushing the total to the point it looks more like a phone number. I remember my Pentium 66 and I remember what it cost, and PC users have never had it so good!