|
July
4, 2000 - By Dave
Altavilla
 |
| HotHardware's
T-Bird Test System |
| A
little un-orthodox |
|
System
1:
Full Tower ATX
Case w/ 300W PS, Slot A
Thunderbird Athlon 700 (provided by Azzo
Computer), Gigabyte
GA-7VX Motherboard (full review soon),
128MB of PC133 SDRAM, WD Expert AC418000
7200 RPM ATA66 Hard Drive, Elsa Gladiac,
Kenwood 72X CDROM, Win 98SE,
NVidia 5.30 Drivers, DirectX 7.0a
System 2:
Full
Tower
Tower
ATX Case w/ 300W PS, Engineering Sample of
Pentium III 933EB, Abit
CX6 i820 Motherboard, 128MB of
800MHz (400MHz. DDR) RDRAM, WD Expert
AC418000 7200 RPM ATA66 Hard Drive, Kenwood
72X CDROM, Elsa Gladiac GeForce2 GTS AGP,
NVidia GeForce Reference Drivers Version
5.30,
DirectX 7.0a, Win98SE
 |
| Benchmarks
On A Bird |
| Throttle
up! |
|
|
Let's
just punch this one out so we can get to
the fun.
Winbench
99 Test - @ 863MHz.
(click
to view)
In
the CPU and FPU Winmarks department, the
T-Bird is right on par with our test
system 2 at 933MHz. Again, the KX133
and Thunderbird combination shows its
muscle.
Finally,
here are our obligatory gaming test scores
with Quake 3 Arena. What
benchmarking test would be complete
without it? First, let's look at our
system with no over-clocking to the CPU or
Graphics Card.
Quake
3 Arena Timedemo
Not
too shabby at all if you ask us! But
wait, let's turn it up a notch on both
ends of the graphics pipeline!
For
a processor that retails right around $200
(at Azzo,
of course) you can't go wrong with this
type of performance. What is a
little odd is the fact that the Graphics
Card cost significantly more than the host
processor in our system.
Well,
that just about covers all we know to date
about the 700MHz. Slot A Thunderbird
Athlon Processor. We've shown you
performance at all levels of clock speeds
we could wring out of this new beast and
how to run it on the latest chipset for
the Athlon platform. In the coming
weeks, we feel fairly confident that the
Slot A Thunderbird will make its way a
little more to the mainstream channel and
further stabilize on KX133 chipset
boards. If this happens, Power Users
and Overclocking Fanatics around the globe
will most likely flock to this chip for
its value and better flexibility for
over-clocking and unlocking the
multiplier. It will be interesting
to see if the Socket A versions of the
Duron and T-Bird chips start having their
multipliers unlocked by the various
Motherboard Manufacturers who are bold
enough to add it as a feature. Until
that time, the Slot A T-Bird brings you
its new high speed on chip cache with a
little of the old Athlon accessibility
through its "Gold Finger"
connector. We'll be dropping hints
to various Motherboard Manufacturers
urging them to stablize their KX133 boards
with the Slot A Thunderbird. We'll
just have to see how the whole thing pans
out.
Get
into the HotHardware Conference Room and
Speak Your Mind!
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