As you may have heard, the new front side bus setting will require new Athlon processors with clock multipliers adjusted to take into account the higher bus speed. This is not a problem for those who are upgrading older system, but if you just purchased a 1.2GHz system and do not wish to try your hand at unlocking the L1 bridges, then you will need to buy another processor if you are craving the DDR route. Not surprisingly, we didn't have the patience to wait for one of these new CPUs.

Since the board that shipped with our review system was an early reference design, it stands to reason that AMD didn't put much thought into overclocking. The Corona motherboard features a box of four DIP switches for front side bus manipulation, but after trying every single possible combination, we determined that only two bus speed were available – 117MHz and 133MHz. The 117MHz setting consistently wreaked havoc on the IBM Deskstar hard disk used in testing, so we were relegated to the default setting of 133MHz DDR.

Given that the AMD-760 is brand new, we only had access to one processor that was designed for the 266MHz bus. In order to do any overclocking, we would have to find a CPU made for the 100MHz DDR (200MHz) bus that would run reliably at 266MHz. We knew this would not be an easy task, so we rounded up every Socket-A CPU in the lab and prayed that we wouldn't fry anything.

Systematically, we booted the DDR system with each of the test CPUs to find that only one of the ten contestants would even get past the BIOS post. That same processor, a Duron 600MHz, would also be the one test sample that would run all of our test applications stably, minus SYSMark 2000. As you can see from the CPUID screen capture below, the Duron is running on a 266MHz front side bus for a total of 800MHz. For the sake of comparison, we also ran a Duron 800 on the KT133 platform with standard PC133 memory. How did the comparably clocked Duron fare? Read on, friends…