AMD Socket-A 133MHz FSB/DDR Overclocking Guide

AMD currently has 1GHz Athlons available, and we have already seen Durons overclocking to 1GHz levels and sometimes beyond that, so it makes sense that an overclock to 1GHz is pretty reasonable. The two chips that were made for this overclock are the Athlon 750 and the Duron 750. Why? Because they both have a 7.5x hard coded multiplier, and simply switching to the 133MHz FSB will yield a 1GHz clock speed, provided that your CPUs can handle it.

If they can't, you can just as easily drop the clock multiplier to 7.0x or 6.5x while keeping the 133MHz FSB. And as you're about to see, the 133MHz FSB is definitely worth it over a small clock speed drop if necessary.

Let's take a look at the currently available Athlon and Duron CPUs, their clock multipliers, and see which speeds we should aim for in general with this type of overclocking.

The numbers in Red are the ones that aren't too realistic expectations, not with conventional cooling or based on AMD's current yields. The bold numbers in the last column, however, are fairly reasonable goals to shoot for. And using the multiplier adjustment techniques we discussed earlier, if you have a Duron 800 for example and aren't able to hit 8.0 x 133MHz, then you can simply decrease your multiplier (assuming you have a board capable of doing that) to 7.5x or 7.0x and still maintain a good speed increase.

As we mentioned earlier, the two CPUs we'll be focusing on will be the Athlon 750 and more importantly the Duron 750. Why do we saw more importantly? Well, the Duron 750 currently sells for $90 - $100 boxed, or $70 - $80 for OEM parts. Not too bad for something that has the potential to run at 1GHz.