XP 1800+ now only £106 (AMD Athlon (Thunderbird))

Member Name: Ten98

Product:	AMD Athlon (Thunderbird)
Date:	30/04/02 (1387 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Poweful, Cheap, Stable

Disadvantages: Requires reasonably new motherboard, Heat

The never ending march of progress does bring us wonderful things.

For me it has brought a brand new Athlon XP 1800+ CPU for just over a hundred pounds. This chip runs at 1.533Mhz, and with the use of extra cooling can go up well above that if required. To be perfectly honest though, once you're over 1.5ghz any increase in power isn't going to be that noticable as the rest of your computer won't be able to keep up.

The price point of this chip is very attractive indeed, considering you could have paid more than double this price for a less powerful 1.4ghz chip less than 6 months ago

The 1800+ rating is supposed to indicate that this chip is as powerful as an 1800mhz Pentium 4, which is partially true. The chip can get as many calculations done in a quicker time than a faster intel chip, meaning that for most applications, this will operate faster than a more expensive intel CPU. There are areas in which the 1800mhz Pentium marginally outperforms this chip, but never by more than 3 or 4%.

To take full advantage of the speed offered you need a fairly new motherboard with DDR memory, but any motherboard which runs a Duron or Athlon processor will be able to run this chip.

The only disadvantage this chip has is the amount of heat produced. AMD say that their chips will run at temperatures of up to 80 degrees celcius, but at that kind of temperature you will get frequent system crashes. Realisticly you are looking at keeping this chip below 60 degrees C for error-free operation, which does require a large amount of active cooling.

Run it without a heatsink and it will reach over 300 degrees and cease functioning after a mere 1/8th of a second. In most cases this is enough to render it useless. The risk of fire to computers with processors that operate at these speeds is much higher than it was 2 or 3 years ago with slower chips of 500mhz or less. Intel chips suffer from the same problem, it's a side e
ffect of using silicon at such high frequencies.

Summary: