Product Reviews

Athlons without the XP suffix are based on the Thunderbird design, without the fancy new features discussed in the Athlon XP review. The Thunderbird version of the Athlon was originally available at clock speeds between 650MHz and 1.4GHz. These days, however, you'll be hard pushed to find anything slower than 1.1GHz on sale. From 650MHz to 1GHz, the Athlon is available only with a 100MHz front-side bus (200MHz when coupled with DDR memory). At speeds of between 1GHz and 1.4GHz, however, it comes with either a 200MHz or a 266MHz front-side bus.

This allows the Athlon to take advantage of 266MHz PC2100 DDR RAM, a technology introduced just a few months back. All Athlons,

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both the Thunderbird and Athlon XP, have 384K cache, running at the full clock speed of the processor.

Will it work in my PC?

If you're buying a Thunderbird Athlon, make sure you get the sort you want. It's no use teaming up an Athlon that has a 200MHz front-side bus with 266MHz DDR RAM. You won't get any performance benefit from the faster memory. Other than this, though, as long as you have a Socket A motherboard, you should be fine. As always, if your system is more than about six months old, it's a good idea to update to the latest BIOS.

Performance

Considering it now belongs to yesterday's generation of processors, the Thunderbird 1.4GHz really does very well in our performance tests. It doesn't trail either the Athlon XP or the Pentium 4 by much in 3D performance.

Overall

If you're upgrading, this chip is a real snip. For only ninety-five quid you get a processor that's almost as powerful as the Pentium 4, and not far off the Athlon XP.

If you're in the market for a whole new system, though, and you're torn between buying an Athlon and an Athlon XP, you should at the very least make sure your PC is Athlon XP-ready - otherwise you'll have to buy a new motherboard next time you want to upgrade.