Reply 20 of 54, by maddmaxstar
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wrote:The early Athlon motherboard hardware had a pre production feel to it. Little refinement, bugs, high sensitivity to power supply output, AGP instability, etc. There are a few boards with huge areas of unused, unnecessary PCB (very sloppy work). AMD 750 was AMD's contribution there because that chipset has broken AGP 2x. The CPUs themselves were perfectly fine AFAIK.
I'll have to agree with that. My Slot A Athlon 550 featured in my Avatar is one of the early Argon cores that's labeled "7th Generation Processor", and apparently that's not uncommon. Not to mention that because it was such an early chip, the CPUID string says "AMD K7" rather than "AMD Athlon", which threw Windows XP for a loop when it was first released (ie: no processor enhancements enabled, it ran slow without a patch).
Not to mention it's matching FIC SD11 motherboard was a humungous but almost bare ATX board that had few enhancements or modifications from the early pre-production versions of the board.
Other than that, the machine ran pretty stable. I was using a Voodoo 3 at the time, so I didn't have many AGP 2x issues with the SD11's Irongate Northbridge. The machine was an incredible performance beast as well compared to what my friends had, that 2 of my friends and my Brother got Slot A systems not long after I got mine. I still have my Athlon T-shirt somewhere that I got for registering with AMD.com back then, I used to only wear it to LAN Parties. 😜
= Phenom II X6 1090T(HD4850) =
= K7-550(V3-3000) =
= K6-2+ 500(V3-2000) =
= Pentium 75 Gold(Voodoo1) =
= Am486DX4-120(3DXpression+) =
= TI486DLC-40(T8900D) =
= i386sx-16+i387(T8900D) =