Basic Duron overclocking questions

[Shag]

Forgive my ignorance here, I have been out of touch with the overclocking world for a while now. I'm currently running my trusty Abit BH6v1 with celeron 300A@464mHz combo, but am thinking it might be time to upgrade. I'm considering the Duron 600 and overclocking it to (hopefully) 950mHz. I have done some brief searching (not a lot of time on my hands right now), but haven't found the answers to my basic questions. So, here goes:

1) In order to o/c the Duron 600 to 900/950, what memory bus speed is required? I have a 128M stick of PC100 and a 128M stick of PC133 that I'm wondering if I'll still be able to use. Is this overclock primarily a multiplier overclock? Or is is a multiplier/fsb combo?

2) Is there a general consensus on which board is better, the Asus or the Abit? I don't need the RAID version of the abit, as I'm running a 10k rpm Atlas 10k.

3) Is the Duron 600 considered the best overclocker in the Duron line?

4) Out of curiousity, will the performance gain going from 464mHz to 950mHz be a great at is sounds? How does the performance of an overclocked Duron compare to a similarly clocked PIII or Athlon/Thunderbird?

Thanks.

 

[paulip88]

1) You can get by with PC100 on either one of the boards you're looking at. In fact, some people even claim that PC100 works better. I'm a bit skeptical about that, but both of the boards do support PC100. The OC is primarily based on multiplier, though the two boards do also give you the option of adjusting the FSB.

2) Both are supposed to be decent boards for OCing. I've heard more complaints about the Asus, but that is probably due to the fact that more people use the board than the ABit (seeing price as well as when it was introduced). It could also be due to inexperience (though there were definitely some legit issues that seem to have been resolved in later revisions of the board). If you know you won't be doing a RAID, I'd go with the Asus and spend the money saved on a faster processor. I would not count on a 600 to go at 950.

3) Not sure. I've heard of many success stories, but there are also some less than stellar performers. Seems like the average OC is about 850. Check out the CPU db on www.overclockers.com and decide for yourself.

4)I know that the performance gain of my Duron@800 over my PII@450 isn't that staggering, but then at the same time the PII system is equipped with SCSI, so that might give it an extra ounce of performance. I do know that it is a helluva lot faster than my dad's Celeron 433. As for how a Duron compares to the Tbird, PII, I'd recommend that you check out Anand's review of the Duron 750. I have NOT done any benchmarks.