SLT A? SKT A BULK? Uhhh...

[Okotauri]

Ok, I'm in the process of buying an AMD Thunderbird 1GHz but i'm confused about exactly what to buy.. Will someone please explain the differnces between a SLT A, SKT A BULK,
and an SKT A (I know they mean Slot a, and Slocket A but what are the proformence differnces?)? Also, which one of the below should I purchase? Price doesn't matter, only looking for the best:

OEM K7(ATHLON)-1GHZ MODEL4 ThunderBird W/ 256K FULL SPD CAHE 200FSB 3D NOW IN SLT A - CPU-AMD-A1000

OEM K7(ATHLON)-1GHZ PGA ThunderBird W/ 256K FULL SPD CAHE 200FSB 3D NOW IN SKT A - CPU-AMD-A1000/PGA

OEM K7(ATHLON)-1GHZ PGA ThunderBird W/ 256K FULL SPD CAHE 200FSB 3D NOW IN SKT A BULK - A1000AMT3B

Thanks
- Oko

 

[virmaior]

For a while AMD was packaging all of the Athlons as slot A. Slot cpu's are more expensive to manufacture since you have to make the Slot pcb in addition to the cpu. Thunderbirds were originally only going to be Socket A since the only reason that athlons had been using a slot was due to the L2 cache being off of the processor die.
BUT a large number of oem's had boards lying around that were Slot A, and they want to be able to sell them. AMD decided to make Slot A Thunderbirds to fill their demand. The BULK on the end means that the reseller is selling them at that price in like units of 50 or 100 or something like that (i.e. not what you're looking for).

Right now, there aren't very many socket A mb's (There's like 1 from gigabyte, 1 from epox, 1 from fic).

Conversely, not all slot A MBs will work with a thunderbird. The via chipset has a timing problem that makes it incompatible with the thunderbird. So only slot A boards based on the AMD chipset (750) will work with a slot A thunderbird.