Overclocking Duron

We have witnessed the triumph of AMD Duron as an ideal CPU for overclockers, although it was a well-known fact already. This CPU has pleasantly low price and often reaches the height of 1GHz during proper overclocking. If used on mainboards supporting 133MHz FSB, Duron may be regarded as a serious rival even for Pentium III. As our tests have shown, in most 3D games 1GHz Duron-based systems with an overclocked FSB prove to be faster than similar systems built on Pentium III. There should follow a remark that in office applications Pentium III finally resists Duron's aggression. Anyway, the performance in business applications is not that crucial for an overclocker as fps rates in games.

If you don't approve of extreme overclocking, you may enjoy a really good performance gain if you only set your Duron at 133MHz FSB. Thanks to the synchronously working memory and CPU buses, Duron processor with 133MHz FSB frequency nearly catches up with Athlon, which works with 100MHz FSB.

As a final word, we should admit that nowadays the combination of AMD Duron CPU and a mainboard based on VIA KT133A chipset is the best for an overclocker, who strives to have high performance for small money.