duron vs. t-bird, you tell me!

[gplracer]

I have a duron that runs at 850mhz. I really want to go faster.(I have no idea why my voodoo 5 seems maxed out!) I was thinking of maybe buying a copper t-bird but the price is about $229 or possibly $259 for one tested at 1 gig or better. What is the real difference? Would I see anything different?

 

[Maverick2002]

duron: 64k cache
tbird: 128k cache

tbird is faster, but cant oc as much..........
im on a small budget so im sticking with duron
why the F**K do you need anything faster than 850 anyway???? youre not simulating nuclear explosions are you???? LOL

 

[BurntKooshie]

um....the L2 of the Duron is 64k (exclusive). The L2 of the Tbird is 256k (exclusive). They both have 64k L1 data cache, and 64k instruction cache. A T-bird is about 10-20 percent faster in most things, but that's just generally, in some cases such as RC5, there is no difference per mhz.

 

[TuffGuy]

above 700mhz your graphics card is the limiting factor. get a better graphics card. you won't see much difference if you get a t-bird. use the money and get at least a geforce2 mx.

 

[rigor3]

a duron at 1000mghz runs as fast as the t-bird at 900. basically 100mghz speed loss.

it would take a duron 1200mghz to reach a t-bird at 1100.
doubt that will happen ever, since the cost of cooling a duron to that speed would outweigh the cost of just getting a tbird

 

[todays]

Yeah, but when you overclock the Duron to 1000 Mhz and can only get the T-Bird to 900 Mhz the potential for tweaking your memory scores with the Duron are better. I ran a 750 T-Bird at 918Mhz against a guy with a Duron at 1050 Mhz. He was faster at Sandra 2000 Memory scores, faster at SETI also. Seems like the FSB on the Duron will go higher than with the T-Bird. My vote is go for the Duron and buy a better video card.
Have you tried better cooling to get that Duron going better? I replaced my 60mm fan on my PAL6035 with an 80mm 40cfm case fan on the back of the case. I have a duct going from the Alpha to the back of the case. It dumps all the air out of the case and really keeps my T-Bird cool. 918 Mhz at 1.75v 45c full SETI load! I can do 950 Mhz with 1.85v but eventually lock-up due to heat running SETI after about an hour. With just the 60mm 27cfm fan on the Alpha I could only get to 875 Mhz stable.

 

[BurntKooshie]

It is important to note that a Duron recieves (proportionally) more benefit from a faster memory speed / lower memory latencies than does a Thunderbird, BECAUSE of the lack of L2 cache (cache helps to absorb some of the latencies). For a Duron OC, its more important to raise the FSB/memory speed/memory latencies than it is to increase core speed - though doing both is best of course