I was too scared to do that in-case I fried it at the time.
AMD Duron build performance.
- Thread starter Vinno
- Start date
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
That 512 stick must have cost you a pretty penny back then!
I remember testing Doom 3 on a Geforce 3 Ti200 and 4 Ti4400 and getting surprisingly good frames. My biggest joy was with an ATI 9500 I soft modded to a 9700, I still fully believe that's the reason many of the later GPU manufacturers started to cut the lines on their chips and possibly CPU.
The ATI 9700 Pro was shockingly good and turned Nvidia into a poorly built catch up machine for years, they released the 5800 Ultra in response and it was probably the first tech related internet meme/mockery (they joked about it themselves thus the video back then, shows how times have changed):
Thing put ******* leaf blowers to shame and people were not too fussed about noise back then.
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Yep! It had a pretty stout heatsink on it, and 18 activity LED's. it was pretty cool for it's time.
Nice! I had a 9600 XT as well, I quite liked that. I should have done the typical buy a 9800 Pro and flash it to an XT, though
I remember playing FarCry at 1900x1200 IIRC? The typical high Hz 19" DELL CRT, that you could pick up anywhere for cheap 2nd hand, and the seller didn't have a clue what it was really worth - IIRC I paid about £60 for a 100+ Hz one.
Yeah the 9700 Pro was a beast. I never knew about the 9500-9700 Pro softmod, I take it you mean a BIOS flash, like with the 9800 Pro > XT?
Haha, when he's drying his hair with it
That reminds me, a mate had a Tornado fan once, an 80MM, the entire top floor of his house was vibrating, it was crazy loud.
After that noise, it made me compelled to watch this (yet again) afterwards due to the noises he makes, and @21 second's he sprains his ankle
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Nope.
There was a version of the 9500 (non pro) that had the same memory bus as the 9700, most were on the same PCB. You could spot it physically on the card by the L shaped memory config. The mod turned a budget/mid range 9500 (not even the pro) into a flagship ATI card. It was literally doable via software in Windows, it's why it's glued into my mind to this day as the best mod of all time.
There were ways to boost Nvidia cards around the same time frame, there were budget versions of the 5900 series that could be turned full fat with a bios flash (and similar to turn the likes of the 9800/se into 9800XT with ATI) but nothing remotely as simple as the 9500 soft mod.
That's imo why a lot of companies started laser cutting stuff as time went on, yields for X or Y chips were never as claimed back then ergo why that stuff was possible. They just rebranded their own hardware a lot of the time, it's where the entire overclocking passion started.
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So what exactly was the mod if it wasn't a BIOS flash? Just setting the clocks manually to that of the 9700 Pro?