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AMD Athlon XP “Thoroughbred” 1800+: Hardly Overclockable Athlon XP Processor With Unlocked Multiplier [Updated].

Category: Other

by Anton Shilov

[ 11/30/2002 | 09:35 AM ]

Since AMD had a lot of difficulties with the product transition to the thinner fabrication technology, the company sold their Palomino based chips as the lower-end offerings. Since the 0.18 micron CPUs were pretty hard to overclock over 2000MHz, some overclockers who are concerned about the price of their processor decided to wait for the lower-end models of Thoroughbred chips which should show significantly stronger ability to work at much higher clock-speeds compared to the predecessors. As a result, a lot of hardware enthusiasts have been expecting the lower-clocked AMD Athlon XP processors based on the 0.13 micron Thoroughbred CPU-core since June.

In mid-October AMD finally managed to tune their 0.13 micron lines fine enough to start producing even cheap processors using this manufacturing technology. This month AMD Athlon XP 1700+, 1800+ and 1900+ processors showed up, and various hardware observers tested them on overclockability.

Our friends from OverClockers.ru web-site managed to get three AMD Athlon XP 1800+ CPUs based on the 0.13 micron core from a store. The most surprising fact about the newbies is that their multiplier is not locked! According to the guys over the site, the microprocessors they obtained are available in stores and are not promotional samples. The chips are clocked at 1533MHz by default what corresponds to 1800+ model number. The default core voltage of the unit is 1.50V in contrast to Vcore of 1.65V of the 2800+ CPU. To great upset of the testers, the newcomer was not able to work at 2000MHz core-speed even with 2.0V core voltage. The guys only managed to get it stable at 1800MHz (2200+ model) with 1.70V and nothing more. Not the greatest result I have seen, but still a performance gain for free.

The Athlon XP “Thoroughbred” 1800+ cost from $77 to 92 in Japan and about $70 in Moscow.

To sum up, the lower-clocked Thoroughbred processors have finally appeared, but do not expect great overclockability from them. On the other hand, the indisputable advantage of such devices is definitely the unlocked multiplier, what makes the overclocking much easier even for novices.

Additional Facts: The Athlon XP 1800+ processor is based on the older stepping 0 core revision of the Thoroughbred. The lowest CPU based on the Thoroughbred stepping 1 is the Athlon XP 2000+, according to our AMD Athlon XP 2600+ CPU Review.

The guys over OverClockers.ru used Thermaltake Volcano 7 cooler to overclock the mentioned chips.

Personally, I, as well as a lot of other analysts, do not consider water-cooling or vapochill monsters as a common way of cooling a microprocessor. Though, we admit that in some cases the chips may be overclocked better when the unusual cooling-devices are utilised.