AMD Athlon "Thunderbird" 1.1GHz

Conclusion

AMD has kept up their end of the competition, releasing a faster clock speed Thunderbird for every Pentium III released that challenges its domain. But as we've seen in the past, clock speed doesn't mean everything, in the end there are a number of factors that you have to take into consideration that will ultimately decide what CPU is right for you.

First of all, if you have older peripherals, hard drives, etc... that could be slowing you down, upgrading to a faster CPU won't yield the incredible performance improvement you're hoping for. As our Quake III Arena benchmarks have shown, in some cases there was no more than a 5 fps difference in performance between a 600MHz Athlon and a Thunderbird running at 1.1GHz because of the fact that the video card was limiting the overall performance of the system. So definitely make sure that there are no other bottlenecks, or very few, present in your system before considering upgrading to one of these CPUs.

Secondly, if you find yourself with a solid BX board, the upgrade is simple. As long as your motherboard supports the Pentium III, you'll be much better off just making that upgrade since you don't have to worry about the cost of purchasing a new motherboard. If you aren't satisfied with your current platform, then the number of upgrade options increases.

The Socket-A market is definitely a growing one. The Thunderbird is very competitive with the Pentium III and AMD has shown, through the release of their 1.1GHz Thunderbird that they can keep up with whatever clock speeds Intel may throw at them, all while making sure that their CPUs are actually available in more than just "limited quantities." The Thunderbirds are noticeably cheaper than their Pentium III counterparts, the only downside is that Socket-A motherboards can be somewhat expensive. We have seen prices fall a bit, however our top picks for Socket-A motherboards are both priced above $150, while prices will come down, for now that is the only drawback.

Motherboard prices aren't hurting Thunderbird sales as much as they are impacting Duron sales, why? Remember that advantage we mentioned earlier in the review that the Celeron still holds over the Duron? You can currently put together a Celeron + i810 motherboard combo and have a very low-cost system, but for the Duron, there is currently no integrated video solution to compete with the i810. While it may not be that big of a deal to most hardware enthusiasts that don't really want integrated video, it is a very big selling point for an entry-level Celeron system, a very low price point What point is there to having a $70 processor when the motherboard will cost system integrators twice that? AMD desperately needs VIA's KM133 (KT133 + integrated Savage4 video).

So there we have it, the Thunderbird is now past the 1GHz barrier, how far will it go this year? Will the introduction of the Mustang core end the Thunderbird's recent reign as AMD's flagship core? This fall should hold some powerful CPUs from AMD and Intel. With the Pentium 4 due for an appearance later this year, it'll be interesting to see if AMD positions the Thunderbird to go head to head with the P4 or appoint a new Mustang variant to handle the job.

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