Stepping Up the Duron 700
Author : The Doc

Duron is AMD's newest chip out of the pipe. Since it came out, not only did it kick aging Celeron's ass in all the benchmarks, but it also proved to be a great chip for OC'ing.

Locked?
Like Intel's chips, the new AMD's are multiplier locked. But unlike our friends from California, AMD's can be unlocked. And all it takes is a pencil.

Pinless?
Probably one of the biggest beefs people have right now are the nasty rumours that AMD is hacking off the 4 pins that enable a motherboard to determine the speed the chip runs at. For as far as I know, nobody has actually seen a chip missing the pins, so don't worry about it for now.

The Bridges
AMD's Socket426 (aka SocketA) chips have a whole whack of bridges on the top of the chip. These bridges are cut and connected to determine the specs that the slug will run at. When Duron first hit the market, a bunch of hardware sites posted all sorts of articles about overclocking it. Everything from what tool to use to disconnect the bridges on the chip, to hacking up motherboards to get it running.

Eventually, it was found that you didn't have to worry about cutting the bridges, you just had to connect a few of em.

The conductive pens work great, but are sometimes draw too wide a line (these bridges are damn SMALL). Somebody found out that a plain old HB pencil contains just enough graphite (conductive) to let the current go thru the bridge. OK, enough of that. Wake up and let's get down to it already :) Heres our test box:

AMD Duron 700
ABit KT7-RAID
192 Megs PC-133 CAS2 RAM (different brands)
Mk. I SocketA Golden Orb (aka the original Orb with a new clip)
Windows Millennium Edition

The rest in unimportant :)

* lemme just make a note of this, the Abit KT7 is hands down, the BEST SocketA board I've ever used. The KT7-RAID adds, (obviously) RAID to an already great board.

1 - Connecting the bridges
First thing we need to do is get the Duron ready. For stability, mount it into the board first.

Now, this is where the L1 bridges come in. You need to get a very sharp pencil to connect these things. I used a standard 0.5mm mechanical pencil which worked great. Connect the 4 bridges, but don't let any of them connect with their neighbours, unless you want a new keychain. There's a tiny gap in the bridge where the laser cut them in half. Make sure you fill em in good.

2 - Trying your handiwork
First thing we want to do is stick a HSF on there. And for gods sake BE CAREFUL! Startup the system at the default freq. If all is well, shut it off. Bump the multiplier up one notch, and start it up. This is where we separate the winners from the losers. If it doesn't startup, or it starts up as it's marked frequency again, you're probably part of the latter group. Go back and check the L1 bridges. Now some chips just don't respond well to the pencil trick at all. If you seem to have one of these buggers, then take the pencil marks off the chip, grab a thin conductive pen and connect them with that.

Crushing the slug
I can't understand how countless people are still crushing their poor Durons and T-Birds after the issue originally came up. As long as you're CAREFUL with it, you can use any heatsink made for them! This includes the original SocketA Gorb that's been blamed for a busload of Duron and T-Bird homicides. Theres a great article about the RIGHT way to install a heatsink.

3 - Going Higher
The mileage you get from your Duron may vary, but most of the chips can hit an upwards of 900mhz very easily. If you're new to overclocking, you may or may not know that the key to getting a stable chip running faster is voltage. No if, ands or buts about it, a Duron just can't run at 900mhz while running at it's default voltage (1.5v). Some people only had to bump the voltage up to 1.65v, some still had problems even at 1.85v (currently the highest setting on a stock KT7 board). You need to find a happy median. Go with the lowest voltage where the chip will POST (at your desired freq) and work up from there, until you get as much stability as possible. The chip and combo I used in this article ran at 950mhz stable at 1.75v.

Multiplier or FSB?
You have 2 choices with the new AMD chips. You can up the multiplier, or the front side bus. Due to (I'd think) limitations of the KT133 chipset, most people don't get very far with upping the FSB without running into trouble. This Duron wouldn't even start at 106mhz FSB. But remember, since these chips run at 200mhz DDR (Essentially base FSB*2), a 105mhz bus speed is in actuality 210mhz DDR. So your best bet is to up the multiplier, and keep the base FSB at 100mhz. (On some boards, eg the Asus A7V, you have to lock the FSB at 100mhz before being able to change the multiplier anyway).

4 - Testing your new frequency
Last thing to a good overclock is putting it thru the ringer. One of the best ways to test stability is to get Prime95 crunching on it. (Go into Options->Torture Test to start er up).

Benchmarks. You know you want them. For this, I bumped the Duron right up to a gig (@1.85v), for comparison. So, here they are, telling it like it is:

WCPUID @ 700mhz	Now @ 1000mhz
Sandra @ 700mhz	Again @ 1000mhz
3DMark2K @ 700mhz	Finally @ 1000mhz

I'm gonna blatently blame the Voodoo3 for the low scores on 3dMark2K. I guess this is the difference between a $75US vidcard and a $240 one. Not to mention the final scores are VERY close. Only thing to really note is the difference in CPUMarks between the speeds.

Conclusion
The Duron didn't just push the Celeron off the cheap overclocking pedestal, it's blew it out of a cannon into a brick wall. If you're in the market for a 1 Gig $110 CPU, then AMD's Duron is your chip. Happy OCing!

Cheers,
The Doc