AMD Duron build performance.

[jcb33]

Did you do the pencil mod and clock it?
There's a few videos on YT of people playing HL2 with a Duron and a Ti 4200 (or higher) happily getting above 60FPS at a decent resolution - I think that's pretty decent for it's time.

I was too scared to do that in-case I fried it at the time.

 

[Gray2233]

Did you do the pencil mod and clock it?
There's a few videos on YT of people playing HL2 with a Duron and a Ti 4200 (or higher) happily getting above 60FPS at a decent resolution - I think that's pretty decent for it's time.

Depending on the version of the Duron RAM speed could make a healthy difference too, not many people realise but there were Duron CPU's which supported SDRAM and DDR, sometimes on the same board (the ECS K75SA comes to mind, I ran one with a modded bios).

The Durons were surprisingly powerful chips when you knew what you were getting and how to treat them, but if left totally stock/without the right setup you obviously weren't going to have a perfect out of the box experience.

 

[deviation]

Depending on the version of the Duron RAM speed could make a healthy difference too, not many people realise but there were Duron CPU's which supported SDRAM and DDR, sometimes on the same board (the ECS K75SA comes to mind, I ran one with a modded bios).

The Durons were surprisingly powerful chips when you knew what you were getting and how to treat them, but if left totally stock/without the right setup you obviously weren't going to have a perfect out of the box experience.

I ran DDR400 in mine.
Yeah, which is why I was surprised at some of the comments on here.

 

[Gray2233]

I ran DDR400 in mine.
Yeah, which is why I was surprised at some of the comments on here.

For early gens it would have been DDR200 or 266 depending, I'm assuming DDR200 (advertising was a bit iffy then as DDR was totally new) which would have been old school stuff 100X2, I'm guessing that's what you had?

I couldn't get my Duron to run for love or money outside of DDR 200 but it made such a huge difference it was unreal.

That said, I was also on a bit of a campaign at the time. I spent a little time after high school in a tech college for PC tech and there was a bunch spending a lot on the likes of high end Athlons/early XP chips etc. I spent some Christmas money to buy and then mod the aforementioned K75SA bios to unlock multipliers for oc'ing and grabbed a Duron. The K75SA motherboard was pretty much the cheapest supporting motherboard stocked by most local shops at the time and online wasn't great. Ended up with a heavily OC'd Duron + DDR at 200 + a Geforce Ti4400 (luckiest time in my life apparently as I ordered a ti4200 and got a free upgrade).

It absolutely crapped all over the wealthy students prebuilds on the same course.

As an aside, RAM speeds were a big issue with computing around the time I got into it. My first ever personal (not family member) PC was around the Pentium 3 and Athlon Thunderbird eras, marketing for P3 was peak. The Athlon Thunderbird was actually on par or faster a lot of the time vs the Pentium 3 in real world performance. All of the advertising and many review sites didn't give a like for like comparison, they listed P3's with RAMBUS/RDRAM rather than standard SDRAM and it cost a damned fortune to the point of being untenable for 99% of people. There's a reason it swiftly died out, but between that and iffy software compliers it put AMD on the back foot for yonks outside of the enthusiast market.

 

[deviation]

For early gens it would have been DDR200 or 266 depending, I'm assuming DDR200 (advertising was a bit iffy then as DDR was totally new) which would have been old school stuff 100X2, I'm guessing that's what you had?

I couldn't get my Duron to run for love or money outside of DDR 200 but it made such a huge difference it was unreal.

That said, I was also on a bit of a campaign at the time. I spent a little time after high school in a tech college for PC tech and there was a bunch spending a lot on the likes of high end Athlons/early XP chips etc. I spent some Christmas money to buy and then mod the aforementioned K75SA bios to unlock multipliers for oc'ing and grabbed a Duron. The K75SA motherboard was pretty much the cheapest supporting motherboard stocked by most local shops at the time and online wasn't great. Ended up with a heavily OC'd Duron + DDR at 200 + a Geforce Ti4400 (luckiest time in my life apparently as I ordered a ti4200 and got a free upgrade).

It absolutely crapped all over the wealthy students prebuilds on the same course.

As an aside, RAM speeds were a big issue with computing around the time I got into it. My first ever personal (not family member) PC was around the Pentium 3 and Athlon Thunderbird eras, marketing for P3 was peak. The Athlon Thunderbird was actually on par or faster a lot of the time vs the Pentium 3 in real world performance. All of the advertising and many review sites didn't give a like for like comparison, they listed P3's with RAMBUS/RDRAM rather than standard SDRAM and it cost a damned fortune to the point of being untenable for 99% of people. There's a reason it swiftly died out, but between that and iffy software compliers it put AMD on the back foot for yonks outside of the enthusiast market.

Cool

Mine was OC'ed to 1.2GHz thanks to the pencil trick, and I had a 512MB stick of Corsair XMS3200 DDR400, left over from my Athlon XP 3200+, which then ended up with a 2GB dual channel kit of something else in it (I forget what it was I replaced it with, but it had matt silver heatsinks with writing on them) IIRC it would have been 266MHz FSB.

I remember the XP 3200+ used an ASUS A7NX8-E Deluxe, and the Duron was in a similiar ASUS Socket-A board

I could easily run HL2 at 60FPS+ at 1024x768, which was all the 15" monitor that I had could do, using a GeForce 4 Ti 4200.