Last update :- 29 December 2009
When I was made redundant by Marconi I decided to use some of the money to buy the big brother of the AMD Duron - the AMD Athlon "Thunderbird". The Athlon has improved performance over the Duron at the same clock rate primarily due to the faster 256k cache (compared to the Duron's 64k).
When Intel introduced the "coppermine" Pentium III they had the fastest and best performing desktop processor around. However, AMD soon caught and surpassed them with the Socket A Athlon "Thunderbird". Since then it's been a ding dong battle - Intel introducing the Pentium 4 and AMD producing faster versions of the Athlon that were beaten only by the P4's DDR (remember - data clocked on both edges) and RIMM memory support. Now there are AMD supported chipsets that handle DDR memory (such as Via's KT266a) Intel again have some catching up to do.
For instance, my Athlon 1000@1466 outperforms a P4 1.6 GHz as demonstrated below. The only area where the P4 excels compared to my current system is in the memory tests with DDR against standard SDRAM.
AMD Athlon "Thunderbird"
I chose the fabled "AXIA" version of the Athlon. This marking is the 3rd line down on top of the processor core and the "AXIA" marked versions proved to be very over-clockable with nearly all making 1.4 GHz or better. The "AXIA" is a 100MHz FSB version.
WCPUID & SiSoft Sandra results:
Achieved with an FSB of 133 and a multiplier of 11.
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| Athlon 1000@1466 WCPUID | Athlon 1000@1466 Sandra |
Very quiet compared to the GlobalWin FOP38
Taisol CGK760092
With this heatsink I managed to get the Athlon stable at 52°C under full load and 1.98 voltage. I may change the fan to the Delta 38 6800 RPM version used on the FOP38 to get the temperature down a little bit.
Leadtek A250 TD Winfast GeForce4 Ti4400
Leadtek have a reputation of producing some of the best nVidia chipset based graphics cards and regularily produce cards with "overclockers" in mind. You can tell this by the presence of the hugh heatsink (which covers both sides of the board because the memory is on both sides) in the photo above. The heatsink also integrates 2 fans as opposed to the normal one to cool both the chipset and memory (note that the A250 LE only has the one fan and is based upon the Ti4200 - see the table below). The GeForce4 chipset used on this card is the latest in the GeForce series following on from the successful GeForce2 and GeForce3.
The GeForce4 chipset is accompanied by varying peripheral components to produce 6 main flavours (all based upon nVidia reference designs):
| Default Chip and Memory Speeds of GeForce4 Based Cards | ||||||
| Card | MX420 | MX440 | MX460 | Ti4200 | Ti4400 | Ti4600 |
| Default Video Clock Speed (MHz) | 250 | 270 | 300 | 250 | 275 | 300 |
| Default Memory Speed (MHz) | 166 | 200 | 225 | 225 | 275 | 325 |
The main difference between the MX and Ti series (apart from the reduced memory speed) is that the Ti series include nVidia's nfiniteFX II Engine. To quote nVidia - "The NVIDIA nfiniteFX II Engine incorporates dual programmable Vertex Shaders, faster Pixel Shaders and 3D textures. The nfiniteFX II Engine gives developers the freedom to program a virtually infinite number of custom special effects to create true-to-life characters and environments." If you want more detail visit the nVidia website.
All of these chipsets can use DDR (Double-Data Rate) memory where data is clocked on both rising and falling edges of the clock as opposed to one edge only on SDRAM. This means that the memory speed is usually quoted as double the figure shown in the above table - i.e., 275MHz default memory speed is usually quoted as 550MHz.
nVidia release drivers on a regular basis and there is a feature built-in called "Coolbits" which allows you to overclock the clock and memory speeds. If you do run the video and memory clock at higher than default speeds be aware that this means more heat will be generated and therefore more cooling may be necessary.
With the Leadtek A250 series this is made easier to achieve by supplying their "WinFox" utility with the card which allows you to overclock it (note - these are my default settings):
WinFox II Speed Runner
Below are the results obtained using the popular 3DMark2001 SE test program and nVidia's 40.72 reference drivers:
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| Clock @ 275MHz Memory @ 550MHz |
Clock @ 315MHz Memory @ 650MHz |
I'm quite pleased with these results considering I'm still using the old Athlon rather than the newer Athlon XP and my motherboard only supports PC133 DRAM (single data rate) memory as opposed the newer PC2100, PC2700 and PC3100 DDR DRAM. At 315/650 the card settings are just above the default for the Ti4600 and the only limitation is the memory speed. At these settings there were no faults during the graphics testing - known as "artifacts".
Stock 10Base-T affair.
Used with NTL's broadband 512kbit/s service.
Terayon "TeraJet" 210
Finally got around to replacing the old HP8250i 24x 4x 4x. The key features for this one were speed, price and the fact that it was BURN-Proof (which virtually eliminates bad CDR's).
LITE-ON LTR-16101B CD-RW
Bought to replace the Seimens Nixdorf MCM2103 21" which finally became annoying with screen flicker and power problems. I decided upon quality rather than cost this time with a flat screen capable of supporting high refresh rates. My current default set-up is 1152x864 @ 100Hz.
FLATRON 915FT+
PrimaScan Colorado 2600u Scanner
Formatted as:
Formatted as 9.49 GB (H:) and 9.48 GB (I:) - both for Games
Back-up drive for the C:, D: and E: partitions on the 15.3GB drive. Back-up's are made using the excellent Norton Ghost 2001 (see a review here). This drive isn't normally installed in the machine (because of the obvious drive letter conflict) so I use a removable IDE caddy so I can insert it when needed.
Removable IDE Caddy
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