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Product: AMD T-Bird 1 GHz - AXIA Stepping
Manufacturer: AMD
Homepage: www.AMD.com
Ah, the sweet smell of success. Or rather the strange metallic smell associated with new electrical components. After journeying through the fire swamps and climbing the cliffs of despair, I finally uncovered the treasure that had led me across three continents. Yes, yes, three continents may not be technically correct but what do you expect, the truth? Pffff. Well, what I have finally managed to locate is the lesser known species T-Bird AXIA ( a sub species of the T-Bird genus ).
As more o/cers are finding, these puppies are the big boys of the chip world. The AXIA part is referred to as the "stepping" code and this is what marks them out from the general rabble of birds. As you should all know by now, if you are looking for technical information, forget it. You boys need to go to one of the many other sites to get that sort of ****. Here you are going to get little fact, much speculation and a few skewed but never the less pretty graphs.
Right, I haven't written it yet but most of you know why these are "special". No, not like special friends but as in o/cing. They seem to be the same chips as the higher rated ones as all the latest 1.33 ghz T-Birds are all AXIA codes. This all adds up to much merriment in the camp of overclockers (not the gay o/c site).
Aesthetics
OK on with the show. Let's first take a look at the bird.....yeah right, I'm really going to take a picture of it because it looks sooo different to any other T-Bird. The only difference I noticed was between the Duron and T-Bird with the latter being slightly larger.
Preparation
After the mandatory stroking of said wunderkind, it was time to close those pesky bridges with our friend, Mr. pencil and his friend Mr. rubber ready in case of any mishaps. All went very smoothly so it was slip, slap, slop as the boys down under say and we were ready to go ( translation. - we applied a thin layer of Arctic Silver II to the cpu core ). Let's o/c Lindsay!
Test Rig
Abit KT7A-RAID
256mb PC100 generic
Voodoo 3 3000 PCI
Maxtor 6 Gig HD
Enermax EG 365P-VE
The pc is the same as the one used for the cooler reviews except for the psu which we upgraded to the latest version of Enermax's 365 series. This one produces 350w which will be more than enough for us at the moment. The Abit uses the Via KT-133A chipset allowing us a greater range of fsb speeds during testing.
Installation
Being allergic to noise as I am, it wasn't a hard decision to go with the ThermoEngine over the FOP 38 or the newly arrived WBK 38 ( same fan ). It gave us a chance to see if the V60 could handle the speed we were looking to achieve and also save me from insanity.
Does it work?
The only worry that I had was whether it would fire up the first time, after that anything goes and to hell with the consequences. Straight in with the mandatory "cpu is damaged or unworkable screen" just to **** me up. Into the BIOS, re-set cpu speed and were off. I like the look of 1000mhz at the POST screen, never had it before.
Having said that, it wears off pretty quickly and there's work to be done. Onwards and upwards, quite literally! A quick benchmark for those amongst you who are missing my graphs and yes, I did draw these... or didn't, can't quite remember.
Wow, look at those figures... no I don't know what they mean but the bars are pretty full so that should be a good thing.
With such full bars, where can we go? Well, with the power of AXIA inside, there's only one direction available.
Does it ****!
To cut a short story even shorter, in no time we were flying along at 1.465 ghz at 1.85v (12*122). We only encountered the familiar BSOD at 12*124 and so took it down a level. I must confess to being a bit cynical before when I read about the speeds reached with air cooled rigs. They say the proof of the pudding is in the eating and it was a truly magnificent T-Bird sponge.
Check out these scores!
And these..
I am not sure what to make of the above numbers except to say that the results are about 45% higher, i.e. proportional to the cpu spreed increase.
Cooling
The ThermoEngine coped well with the wattage that this baby was producing but I can't help feeling the FOP would have let us run slightly faster. I am willing to miss out on the extra mhz in the long run for a quiet life. Let's check out the figures for the Dark Destroyer.
It seems that ThermoSonic's claims that the cooler was better to higher rated chips was true. The end results mirror their claims and overall the unit gets the thumbs up from us.
Conclusion
What can I say? You buy a chip, make a modification with a 10 pence pencil, change a number in the BIOS and you have a cpu running at nearly 150% speed. We managed to get this cpu up to a level that isn't even produced yet with the closest speed being priced at around £250. WTF is that about? Using relatively standard air cooling, the mobo was not modified to increase the voltage over 1.85v and yet we attained such a speed. AMD is king of the world at the moment, and with chips like this, why shouldn't they be? There can only be one possible outcome to this review and that is to give it a Raquel Welch (or was it Bo Derek?)
The final ChillBlast rating is **********
Click here to reserve a 1ghz AXIA T-Bird.
AMD's site can be found at www.AMD.com
(Many thanks to Simon for taking the time to find the AXIA amongst his millions of pounds of stock, cheers m8.)