Although we've only tested the T-bird at the 1GHz level, we suspect that at the 750MHz mark, where the L2 cache divider on the classic was set to 2/5, the gap between the "Classic" and the T-bird set at similar frequencies will not be as wide as at the 1Ghz level.
We have only tested a single Compaq KT133-based board. It didn't have any fancy BIOS for us to sieve through and tweak. In fact, it was very much a "Dummy-Proof" final revision of AMD's own board from Compaq (not sure which Taiwanese OEM manufactured it though). There were dip switches that enable the switching of the memory bus speed from 100Mhz to 133MHz, which we suspect might be chopped and changed by some unfortunate end-users that encounter the problem of "Fussiness" (for want of a better term) with PC-133 memory.
Test System #1
- AMD 1GHz Socket A Athlon "Thunderbird"
- Compaq KT133 Motherboard
- NVIDIA TNT2 Ultra (LeadTek GeForce 2 GTS used for Quake III tests)
- 128MB VC133 Memory
- IBM Deskstar 24GB DMA/66
- Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live!
- Windows 98 Second Edition with DX 7.0 installed.
Test System #2
- AMD 1GHz Athlon
- ASUS 7VX KX133 Motherboard
- NVIDIA TNT2 Ultra (LeadTek GeForce 2 GTS used for Quake III tests)
- 128MB VC133 Memory
- IBM Deskstar 34GB DMA/66
- Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live!
- Allied Telesyn AT2700TX
- Windows 98 Second Edition with DX 7.0 installed.
Test System #3
- AMD 650, 700, 750, 800, and 850MHz Athlon
- Gigabyte GA-7IX AMD 751 Motherboard
- NVIDIA TNT2 Ultra
- 128MB HSDRAM Memory
- Western Digital Expert 18.1GB DMA/66
- Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live!
- Windows 98 Second Edition with DX 7.0 installed.
Test System #4
- Intel 667, 700, 750, 800, 866, 933, 1GH Pentium III
- Intel VC820 i820 Motherboard
- NVIDIA TNT2 Ultra (LeadTek GeForce 2 GTS used for Quake III tests)
- 128MB PC800 RDRAM
- Western Digital Expert 18.1 DMA/66
- Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live!
- Windows 98 Second Edition with DX 7.0 installed.
For the TNT2 we used the 3.68 drivers and when using the GeForce 2 for Quake III testing we used the 5.22 reference drivers. OK let's go...
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