AMB chips tend to run hotter than Intel chips, so you may want to invest in high quality cooling solutions and a good power supply. However, there have been reports of overclocking Duron chips as high as 1 GHz (www.tomshardware.com) using the A7V motherboard. Myself, I can't post my chip at speeds over 850 overclocked without extra cooling (like a floor fan), but after it's posted, I can remove the fan and it runs stable. Of course, the issues with overclocking apply to the Duron with respect to wearing out the hardware and reduced stability. The Duron runs on 1.50V by default. As for the performance: the Duron outperforms the Celeron, so as a Celeron replacement, it absolutely boots Intel. However, don't expect it to perform as well as the Pentium III at a similar clock speed. The Athlon can't match Intel's PIII in some instances (usually dealing with floating-point and graphics) so the Duron, basically being the Athlon with a lot less L2 cache (64K as opposed to Athlon's 256K) won't be a PIII replacement. However, the cost of the Duron is probably a quarter of the PIII at an equivalent speed, so you could buy 4 Durons for 1 PIII :) As for hardware? Any hardware that plugs into the standard Motherboard interfaces will work with the Duron. I have a USB mouse, a GeForce DDR, a Sound Blaster Live!, and a network card and they all operate with no problems at all. The motherboard I bought is an Asus A7V. I chose Asus because of their traditional high quality standards in motherboards. The A7V is also known for its fast speeds and easy overclocking. However, it comes at a price: you sometimes pay double for the A7V as opposed to another motherboard. Do some research about motherboards before you buy: it's the most important part of your system. All in all... I'm very satisfied with my AMD system and I have no reason right now to go back to Intel products. > I am planning to build a 750 Mhz system with AMD's Duron processor > primarily for it's cost benefit. The Duron CPU seems to cost less and > perform equally to an Intel CPU. But I prefer input from users who are > using AMD chips. I have a couple of concerns regarding the AMD processor. -- -- Arcana
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