In terms of overclocking, the Athlon 1.2Ghz is bottlenecked from the get-go by its multiplier ceiling of 12.5x. So at 100MHz front-side bus speed the most you can possibly eke out of it is an extra 50MHz. Not exactly the stuff that dreams are made of eh? Never mind and don't get too discouraged. It doesn't take too much more effort to get some more MHz. Play around with the FSB settings and see what dizzy heights you reach. Nonetheless, out of the two new CPUs, overclocking hobbiests/lobbiests might not want to dabble with the 1.2GHz. It's not the CPU for you. Try the cheaper and slightly more overclocking friendly Duron 700…

As our chum Anand pointed out, the Duron 800 uses those pesky Aluminum (and Brits have the correct pronunciation for that word too) interconnects, unlike the T'birds that harbor copper interconnects, cutting your overclocking capabilities quite a bit. You'll need a FAB-30 Dresden-made core if you really want to push the enveloper above and beyond 1GHz.

And now on to the good bit- the benchmarks…

System Specs
Processors: AMD Athlon 1.2GHz & AMD Duron 800MHz
Memory: 128 MB Corsair PC133 CAS2 SDRAM
Motherboard: ASUS A7V
Video Card: Leadtek GeForce2 GTS 32MB Detonator 3, ver. 6.18 drivers
Hard-Drive: IBM 30GB Deskstar 7200RPM DMA/66
Sound: Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live
CD/DVD: Toshiba 48x CD-ROM
Power Supply: Sparkle 350 watt
Operating System: Windows 98 Second Edition

When running the 3DMark 2000 CPU test, we used the Athlon .dll.