AMD Socket-A 133MHz FSB/DDR Overclocking Guide

If we step back and look at how all of the graphs compare, it seems as if the un-overclocked Athlon 750 eventually will outperform the Duron at 1GHz as the amount of data you're dealing with increases. The sweet spot for the Athlon when running against the Duron is in the 64KB - 256KB range where the Duron's performance drops off severely because of its 64KB L2 cache.

So is the Athlon 750 faster than the overclocked Duron at 1GHz? If you are in a situation where your application can't fit within the Duron's L2 cache but it can fit within the Athlon's L2 cache you'll find that the Athlon 750 can be faster than the overclocked Duron at 1GHz. However the majority of cases you'll encounter won't be like that, so to see how the chips stack up let's take a look at what happens when you're dealing with a lot of data, more than can fit in either CPU's cache.

The overclocked 1GHz Athlon comes out on top obviously, but if you'll notice the Duron overclocked to 1GHz levels off in performance since it's using the same memory bus/FSB as the 1GHz Athlon. This also helps it to outperform the Athlon at 750MHz because in this test, the Athlon is limited to PC1600 DDR SDRAM speeds (100MHz x 2). For more information on why it's limited to PC1600 because we're using the 100MHz FSB here, read our AMD 760 Review - it is a chipset limitation, and for good reason.

So now that we know what to expect in theory, let's see what happens in the real world performance tests.