AMD Thunderbird/Duron Investigation & Overclocking Discussion

The Purpose & the Test

What was the point of all of this?  Since it may not be possible, especially with future revisions of the Thunderbird & Duron, to overclock your CPUs as we have been able to with our engineering samples, why on Earth would we spend the time doing this?

In our original Thunderbird and Duron reviews we were limited to only a handful of clock speeds we could provide you with for comparison purposes, simply because we only had a few CPUs. 

Now, with the ability to clock the CPUs at any speed, we can provide you with a more thorough illustration of the performance of the Thunderbird as well as the Duron at all available clock speeds.

So if you're debating whether to go with a lower clocked Thunderbird or a similarly priced yet higher clocked K75 based Athlon, these benchmarks should help you out since we're comparing every commercially available Thunderbird & Duron.

Note: The BX platform running at 133MHz FSB and the Celeron running at 100MHz FSB are both overclocked platforms and are not sold in that form on the retail market. Those performance numbers are only included for purposes of remaining thorough with our comparison.