Introduction: Duron Applebred, come again?

The Applebred is the new revision of the Duron series from AMD. It is a tuned down Thoroughbred B CPU being sold at a lower price. Its primairy market is South America and Eastern Europe where cheap CPU's are more important high performance ones.

They are made in AMD's LAB 25 in Austin Texas, using the same die size, cpuid, voltage, etc as the TbredB. The only main difference is the FSB which is limited to 266Mhz and the L2 cache at 64Kb. The new Durons will run on any motherboard that accepts TbredB CPU's.

The new Applebred will be marketed with real clocks, not performance ratings. This suggest that the limited onboard L2 cache limits the performance. There are 3 different versions available: 1400Mhz, 1600Mhz and 1800Mhz. In this review I will be using the 1600Mhz version.


Specifications

	1800+ DLT3C	Duron 1.6
Frequency	1533 Mhz	1600 Mhz
Core voltage	1.5 Vcore	1.5 Vcore
FSB	133 Mhz (266 Mhz)	133 Mhz (266 Mhz)
L1 Cache I-Cache	64 Kb	64 Kb
L1 Cache D-Cache	64 Kb	64 Kb
L2 Cache	256 Kb	64 Kb

Picture comparison

The duron
The core stepping:

The entire cpu:


The 1800+
The core stepping:

The entire cpu:

Test system

The system I used for benchmarking and testing:

Piotkes rig !
CPU	AMD Athlon XP 1800+ "DLT3C" / AMD Duron 1.6 Ghz
Mainboard	Abit NF7-s Rev 2.0
Cooling	Thermalright SLK800 + 80 mm fan
Memory	2 * 256 Mb pc3200 TwinMos "50B" chips
Video	MSI GeForce FX5200 128 Mb DDR

I used a fresh install of Windows 2000 SP4 with the latest patches.


Benchmarks

I ran all the benchmarks at 2 different CPU speeds:

Applebred & TbredB at stock speeds + TbredB at 1900+ (raised the Multiplier by 0.5, both CPU's run at 1600Mhz this way)

Lowered the multiplier to 10x and increased the FSB to 200, this gives a total CPU speed of 2000Mhz for both CPU's. Where necessary I increased the vcore voltage to have them both running 100% stable


The benchmarks used:

- SuperPi : a very small program, which calculates pi (3.14...) To a certain point, after the comma
- Sisoft Sandra 2004 - CPU benchmarks: CPU Multi Media Benchmark and CPU arithmetic benchmark.
- FutureMark 3DMark 2001 SE Build 330: To see the influence of the processor on the entire system

I could have run more benchmarks, but these benchmarks together give a good impression of what the cpu is capable of.

Before I give you the side-by-side results I would like to show you how far they overclocked! ->

The real reason I bought this cpu for !

As you already have read in this review, both the duron 1.6 and Athlon XP have a stock core voltage of only 1.5v.
I overclocked the CPU's using 2 different methods.

The first way: Stock vcore voltage

I left the CPU working at stock voltage, and started raising the FSB. To test stability I used 3D mark 2001 and SuperPi together. The duron topped out, somewhere between 1850 and 1900 Mhz. This difference in Mhz, is because of the temperature. We had some warm days last month, so CPU temperatures got a little bit high. But generally 1850 Mhz was stable no matter what temperature.
I was able to boot and run superpi at a frequency of 1920 Mhz, but 3D mark wasn't stable anymore.

The Athlon XP on the other hand made it to 2050Mhz. And no matter what temperature, to 2000Mhz.
A difference of 150 Mhz !
Superpi worked stable on 2080 Mhz. Not bad :)

And a graph to make it more clearly:

The Second way: What about higher vcore voltages ?

I just put the Vcore to 1.85v and started raising the FSB and multiplier again. This time the duron made it to 2.2 Ghz. And with only SuperPi I got it to 2250 Mhz.

The XP made it to 2400 Mhz fully stable ! And was capable of running superpi at an amazing 2.5 ghz !

Don't forget, I only used air-cooling, putting both CPU's in a Prometeia/nVentiv system will give you much higher overclocking results.

Upping the voltage one more time?

I got the duron over 2.3 Ghz, by pushing the Vcore to 1.95v. But, raising the Vcore with the XP gave me no gain. So the duron still has some potential, the XP was topped out using air cooling.

SuperPi results:

Lets calculate Pi now. This very small tool is used to calculate the mathematical number pi (3.14...). I always select the option "1M". This means that we're going to calculate pi to 1 million (1 000 000) numbers after the comma.

First bench:

What can we see here ?
Well, the duron and the XP perform equally good at stock speed. Don't forget, the Athlon is 66 Mhz slower. When I put the Athlon at the same speed as the Duron, meaning 1.6 Ghz, it's 1 second faster. I ran this benchmark a couple of times, but I had always the 1 second difference. Is it the extra cache ?

Second bench:

I raised the FSB to 200, and lowered the multiplier to 10. Now it are the same cpu's, except for the cache.
At a speed of 2 Ghz the XP is already three seconds ahead. Hmmm, seems that the limited amount of L2 cache on the Duron is affecting performance.

The Athlon XP is faster in SuperPi without a doubt. Let's see if this trend changes when we use Sisoft Sandra...

3DMark 2001

The well-known and very popular benchmark utility from Futuremark !

First bench:

Same way of benching like before. Below you can see that the Athlon XP is in both cases faster. On equal speed, there's a difference of at least 400 points.

Second bench:

And once again, let's raise the cpu speed....
On higher CPU speeds, the performance difference between the two CPU's is getting lower in this benchmark. Possible reason ? The graphics card is only an FX5200. Less dependable on high cpu speed. When I raised CPU speed of the athlon XP to 2.4 Ghz, It gave me only 400 3D marks more. From stock speed (1533 Mhz) to 2 ghz, which is a difference of almost 500 Mhz, gave me a boost of almost 1000 3d marks. Conclusion, the card is causing a bottleneck for my system. I'm sure that if I've had a much faster VGA card, the score difference would have been bigger.



Now, what cpu is actually the best buy ? Read it in the conclusion on the next page.

Conclusion:

First let's take a look at the prices.

Duron 1.6 Ghz - 50 €
XP 1800+ DLT3C - 70 €

While the Duron 1.6Ghz is entering the shops, the 1800 dlt3c is leaving them. Nowadays it's more difficult to find an Athlon XP with the "magical" code "DLT3C".



If you want to buy a really cheap CPU and don't mind the few percentage drop in performance then I would recommend buying the new Duron Applebred. It is a fair overclocker and using higher voltages and good cooling it has even more headroom!

But if you are after every last extra performance increase, stick with the Ahtlon XP which sports amasing overclocking potential (If you can lay your hands on the JIUHB DLT3C ones), good overall performance and a very competitive price!

Duron Applebred 1.6Ghz
Low price
Overclocks quite good
Easy to find
Small amount of L2 cache

Athlon XP DLT3C
Very good overclocker
Competitivly priced
Harder to find


If you have any remarks please drop them off at our Forums.