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AMD Duron 800


Date
: 12/1/00 – 11:08:29 AM

Author
:

Category
: Processors

Manufactor: AMD
Price: $140

Thanks to MPL for supplying us with this Duron 800

Introduction

The AMD Duron (codenamed ‘Spitfire’) does not need an introduction anymore. It has become the overclockers dream chip over the past few months because it has a very good price/performance ratio. The Duron is also known to outperform its closest contender: the Celeron II or Celerimine.
Apart from that, the Duron also kicks the bullocks of the PIII fairly often, and isn’t far behind on its big brother, the AMD Athlon, better known as the Thunderbird.
The latest addition to the Duron family is the Duron 800 which, as the name states, runs along at a default core clock of 800MHz.

Specifications

- 800MHz stock speed

- 8x mulitplier (of course I immediately unlocked it)

- 64kB on-die L2 cache memory

- 462-pin socket A design

- 1.6v core voltage

I am not going to explain the entire Duron layout and specifications once again, since I already took care of this in my previous Duron 600 @ 1GHz review which you can read here.

Nothing has changed in the design since the first Duron was released, aside from the push in core clock speed. The first model cruised in at 600MHz, as you all probably know, and by now that CPU has cleared the way, making the 650MHz model the entry CPU. I expect to see that one dissapear pretty soon as well, making the 700MHz Duron the slowest AMD CPU available. This will most likely happen when AMD releases their Duron 850.

The Duron 800 I tested was a ‘green’ one. You all know there are blue and green coated Durons floating around, and they say the blue ones overclock better. I have a ‘blue’ Duron 600 cuising along at an amazing 1035MHz with just regular aircooling. But as you will see later in the review, the ‘green’ Durons know their way in the overclocking world too.

Installation

After installing new cpu’s every week I think I can perform this installation job with one hand and blindfolded!! It’s the regular drill you all know: unlock the cpu with your pencil if you did not do it already, up the lever on the socket, put the cpu in, lower the handle again, add thermal paste to the cpu and put the cooler on it.

I want to point out to all of you that the last part is the most critical part of the entire process. Installing the cooler can screw up your cpu! If you don’t believe me, then read my ‘Destruction of hardware’ article here.

Now we are all set to overclock the hell out of this baby and see what she will do ;).

Overclocking

The yields of the currently available Durons lay around 950-1000MHz. Of course, like any red-blooded person, I wanted to reach at least 1GHz and if possible even more.

In order to make the overclocking task easy, we all unlock the multiplier on our AMD cpu’s. This is no different on the Duron 800 which was succesfully unlocked by penciling it’ L1 bridges. A very good how-to for unlocking your AMD cpu can be found here.

Overclocking is no good if you don’t have a proper cooler installed on the cpu. For this cpu I used the relatively new Superorb from Thermaltake.

This cooler is made for AMD cpu’s and features two fans! One in the cooler at the bottom and one on top of it. I won’t go into further details
about it since there will be a review of it soon.

After trying different settings, I found this cpu to be rockstable at an amazing 1040MHz, or 1.04GHz, using a multiplier of 10x with the
fsb set to 104MHz. The core voltage needed to be set to 1.80v to achieve this kind of power.
Thanks to the Superorb, the cpu ran along at 38 degrees celcius with Rc5 running 24 hours a day. This is a very nice achievement.

Now the time is apon us to see how high this puppy rates on the benchtable. Lets get to it …

Benchmarking

Test system:

- AMD Duron 800 @ 1040MHz

- MSI K7T Pro2

- 128MB pc133 ram

- Abit Siluro Geforce MX

- IBM 30GB UDMA100 7200rpm harddrive

Sisoft Sandra Pro CPU Benchmark

It is clear that the Duron @ 1040MHz is kicking everyone’s ass! It kicks the Athlon too, but that’s just because of the extra 40MHz the cpu has onboard. If we look at the Celeron and the P!!! we see that they are left in the dark by this nice cpu.

Sisoft Sandra Pro Multimedia Benchmark

Again we see the same stuff happening! The Duron @ 1040 is pulling away from all the others, especially the Intel cpu’s.

Sisoft Sandra Pro Memory Benchmark

The difference between the Duron 800 and the Duron 1040 is not so big here. The reason for this is that the 800 runs at 8×100 whereas the 1040MHz Duron is running at 10×104. This means that the ram on the 1.04GHz cpu is running 4MHz faster (waw) and that’s causing the difference in performance here.

CPU Mark 99

A difference of almost 14 points is noticed. This benchmark is totally cpu dependend, so we can clearly see the difference in performance between a 800MHz and a 1040MHz chip.

FPU Mark 99

This boils down to the exact same thing as the CPU Mark test.

Conclusion

It seems that AMD released a winner with the Duron 800. I already expected this cpu to perform really well, since it’s basically the same as it’s lower clocked brothers. Of course the Duron 800 is a bit pricier then the Duron 650 or 700,
and you might even achieve the same overclocking results!

The benchmarks are proving it. The Duron is a definate winner, especially if we take its price into consideration. The only reason why we should be buying a Celeron cpu, which is Intel’s weapon against the Duron, is if we want to keep our current motherboard. If you decided to buy a new motherboard, then you will get the best performance and the best price in the AMD bunker :).

The AMD cpu’s manage to outperform the Intel ones because they have an internal 200MHz DDR bus. This really speeds up things! The AMD chips also have a way
better FPU (Floating Point Unit) which is very obvious when you run RC5 like I do. A 700MHz AMD chip can easily catch up with an 800MHz Intel cpu!!

Good

- Overclocks very well

- A lot cheaper then a TBird while performing only a bit slower

- Kicks the Celeron ;)

Bad

- More expensive then the other Durons