AMD Duron

My first homemade PC was rubbish. Being a student, I didn’t have a lot of money and had to get bottom of the range components where possible. This meant that upgrading was fraught with problems, due to hardware incompatibilities and system limitations. Over the years, I managed to assemble a reasonable system, eventually, by buying a new soundcard, graphics card, hard disk, etc. But, at the heart of the system was a fairly feeble AMD K6-2 300MHz, not used to its full capacity because of the decidedly lame PC Chips motherboard it was sat in. The time came to buy a new motherboard, as also ... more

The Duron (formerly Spitfire) is AMD's answer to Intel's Celeron and clock for clock is over 20% better in most applications. As the Duron can be bought for less than half the cost of a Celeron it offer's tremendous value. Based on the new Socket A format, it means that a new motherboard is necessary, but that's not too bad as it is easy to upgrade to a Socket A Athlon from there. Now that the Duron has been around for quite some time there have been quite a few chipset developments. Via KT133 The first chipset developed, offers a 200Mhz front side bus with the ability to run your memory at ... more

The AMD Duron is one of the most powerful CPUs on the market today for the money. A 1.3Ghz chip can be picked up for around the £40 mark. The processor will only fit in a Socket A motherboard, so if you are currently an Intel user you would need to buy a new motherboard to install it. There are no instructions to speak of unless you buy the retail version but its a doddle anyway. Just open the lever on the socket. Drop the chip in (it only fits one way) close the lever, clip the fan assembly over it and your away!. I have a Duron 800Mhz chip in my machine and its fully compatible with Windows ... more

Budget Processors ----------------- Intel Celeron ------------- Current Max. Speed - 766Mhz Bus speed - 66Mhz Level 1 Cache - 32K Level 2 Cache - 128K L2 Cache Speed - Full clock speed Cache type - On die Manufacturing Process - 0.18 micron Material - Aluminium Transistor Count - 28 million Price - £74 (766Mhz) Form Factor - Socket 370-PGA AMD Duron --------- Current Max. Speed - 850Mhz Bus speed - 100Mhz DDR (Effectively 200Mhz) Level 1 Cache - 128K Level 2 Cache - 164K L2 Cache Speed - Full clock speed Cache type - On die Manufacturing Process - 0.18 micron Material - Aluminium Transistor ... more

The AMD Duron was aimed at the celeron, Aimed to take away some of the chips market share. Allthough the chip has not been out long I think it will do some serious damage to Intels Celeron. Like the Celeron is built on the PIII's arcitechture, the Duron is built around the Athlon Thunderbird. Again like the Celeron the Duron has only half the cache of its power counterpart the Thunderbird. With speeds starting at 600Mhz and currently range to 750Mhz in 50MHz steps, the Duron is still a chip that many people will consider as a "power chip" although this really isnt the case, people could be ... more