Ripping it up in a Thunderbird at 1.46 ghz...

All the way live with 
AMD's latest weapon the Athlon Thunderbird 
1.33ghz 266 axia clocked to 1.46ghz 11x133mhz

This will be a very straightforward article since I'm  certainly not an electrical engineer and I don't like acting like one. I'm a gamer...more specifically I am mainly interested in games that many people say are CPU bound. These include Flight simulations, racing sims and other related games. Turns out that these are exactly the types of games that benefit the most from getting a massively fast CPU like the Athlon Thunderbird 1.33ghz 266mhz and over clocking it. So that's exactly what I did all the way to 1.46ghz!. And since everyone is full of questions of whether this upgrade is worth it I figured to take some benchmarks from a couple few games and compare this machine to my old P-III 743mhz. Before we start with the benchmarks lets go over a few things with a little bit of how-to so that someone with clever hands can do this for themselves.

With my old machine I had a couple of pieces that I felt could make the transition. One my Voodoo 5 card, while it probably is holding this CPU up a bit I just cannot live without the awesome FSAA. That is just such a terrific feature that this card will remain in my puter till someone comes out with better FSAA.  In addition I had 256mb of HSDRAM from Mushkin that seemed to be doing fine and certainly would make a fine addition to the mix. I had purchased that ram with the belief that I could always overclock the bus easier than upping the multiplier. It turned out that it was actually easier on my machine to up the multiplier since that had little affect on the ancillary pieces in my puter. For instance my V5 was not at all happy about running at 153mhz though I could play games and benchmark happily at that bus speed. I felt it wasn't stable since at boot up the Win98 screen was corrupted. Also my hardrives were not very happy either. So in the end I just upped the multiplier which sort of meant that I wasted money on HSDRAM since any decent 133mhz ram would have sufficed. Oh well live and learn...at least I had the option and when overclocking, options are good. My Enlight 300watt power supply and hardrives all met the needs of my planned upgrade so off I went to Paragoncomp.com to order my CPU. TC Computers had my choice for motherboards in stock and so off went an order for the latest KK-266 Iwill. 

I had chosen to stay with a regular SDRAM motherboard spec since all the tests I had seen had both the SDRAM and DDR motherboards very close. Having 256mb of sdram sealed the deal as it wasn't very likely that "SHE WHO MUST BE OBEYED" would agree to me buying more ram. 

Both parts came in on the same day and there I was staring at my new stuff wondering whether I had made all the right choices. First off I pulled my Alpha 6035 Cooler purchased from Plycon.com off of my P-III and removed the ASUS motherboard from my Enlight case. The Iwill KK-266 went right into the case with not much fuss at all. The package and parts included with the Iwill were very well done and nothing was missing that would make it difficult.

After hooking it all up and installing all of my hardware I anxiously booted up. A non event is the best way to describe the ease at which I had that computer up and running. Within 10minutes of booting up without touching the voltage I had it up to its current 1.46ghz albeit by using 153 bus speed. (I was still convinced that I couldn't run the multiplier up to 11). To say that I was amazed at the new speed would be an understatement. As I said earlier I ended up using the multiplier to overclock just so that the rest of my puter wouldn't puke. The cpu and memory didn't seem to mind one way or the other. So I ramped it up to a 11x133mhz and ended up with 1.46 at stock voltage. (more on voltage problems later)

Benchmarks.....assume that everything is maxed out in regards graphical splendor and cpu load. Also rest assured that I made sure that the tests were run consistently from CPU to CPU.

This is exactly the type of speed up I was hoping for. I tend to play in 16bit and with x2 FSAA and to see that type of improvements in the 1024x768 x2 FSAA was gratifying. 

Sure wish that V5 had more fill rate. And yet the speed up in the resolution and FSAA setting I use (1024x2FSAA) are enough to be impressed by.

Obviously this was gratifying all the way around.

Wow I guess Flanker really likes CPU's...<G> No doubt these scores would have been even higher with a Nvidia Geforce but the lack of quality FSAA really hurts it for me.

This is gonna be such an intense game that I pretty much decided to upgrade because of this game.

Very nice improvement at 1024x768 x0...wish I had more fill rate for the rest. Nvidia get off your ass and make a card with great FSAA!

Boy do I wish I had the time to get into this game.

Its spectacular to see this game at 1024 x2 FSAA running at 59 frames a second. With a smoooothness....!!!!

This is a big one for me and probably I should have done more benchmarks. Got lazy hehe....Anyways x4 FSAA is finally playable and worth every frame. Its playable since as soon at the grid leaves the framerate jumps up to the limited 36 frames a second.

Overall this was very easy and painless. For just over 418.00 Dollars US including shipping I dramatically upped the speed in all the games I play at the resolutions and FSAA settings I use. There was only one serious problem that I encountered when using my new equipement. 

The problem is the bug in the Iwill bios that causes the Voltage to either be displayed incorrectly or to actually be set incorrectly. For instance currently I have my vCore voltage set to 1.70 but in the PC health display in the Bios its listed running at 1.77. My 3.3 voltage is also running out of spec at 3.9 volts. If this is merely an incorrect display and the voltage is set correctly then no worries. But if it is indeed set at 1.77 then that is indeed a problem from a heat standpoint. The way I have gotten around this problem is to set the bios to a lower than standard voltage. Doing this leads me to believe that it is indeed an actual incorrect setting since when I do set it to the lower voltage my CPU temp lowers to the range thats normal for the Athlon Thunderbird.

Highly recommend this upgrade.

Pierre PAPA DOC Legrand