AMD Socket-A 133MHz FSB/DDR Overclocking Guide

The CPUs

Instead of going through a handful of CPUs to find some that would work to illustrate our purposes we dropped an email to 'Da HeadNut' over at PCNut.com to see if they had any pre-tested CPUs in stock. It turns out that they had two, a Duron 700 that was guaranteed to work at 950MHz (1.85v core) and an Athlon 750 that was guaranteed to work at 1GHz (1.85v). While the Duron 700 wasn't exactly what we were looking for, the Athlon 750 was perfect. The Duron 700 capable of hitting 950MHz would be perfect if are we were interested in was hitting 933MHz (7.0 x 133MHz = 933MHz) however we wanted to do a 1GHz comparison between the Duron and the Athlon in addition to our overclocking experiments.

Luckily one of our Duron 750's hit 1GHz at 1.85v without a hitch which was perfect for what we needed to do. So if you don't want to take the risk of getting a CPU that might not make it as high as you'd probably want to pick up a pre-tested CPU. PC Nut is a vendor we trust so drop by their site at www.pcnut.com if this is something you're interested in. They shipped the CPUs to us pre-tested and already unlocked using the pencil trick, although we would rather they have used conductive ink to do the job.

They're not an AnandTech sponsor, but you can consider them to be an AnandTech recommendation.

PCNut's Athlon 750 guaranteed at 1GHz @ 1.85v

PCNut's Duron 700 guaranteed at 950MHz @ 1.85v

AnandTech's Duron 750 stable at 1GHz @ 1.85v