candle_86 wrote on 2020-04-23, 04:47:

So I found out my Compaq slot a board supports the 1ghz Thunderbird slot a and all slower as well. Now is it worth the price to buy one though. Currently rocking an Orion Athlon 700 aka classic with l2 at 350mhz. Is it worth the premium the Thunderbird slot chips cost?

No.
No athlon above 700MHz is "worth it", except maybe a thunderbird 700 @833 (119*7)

Q3 demo 1.11, 512x384, GF4 MX460 (pure CPU capacity test), on a GA-7IXE with a base clock of 100.7MHz and super bypass enabled (+10-15%) :

K7 500 : 75 fps, K7 600 : 80 fps, K7 700 : 87 fps, K7 800 : 91 fps, K7 950 : 98 fps, K7 1000 : 100 fps
A0 700 : 90 fps, A0 1000 : 110 fps
A0 700@ 777 : 100 fps
A0 700 @ 833 : 108 fps

Other games I've tested (UT, Dethkarz) have even worse gains.

Thunderbird has minimal impact to performance. While L2 cache works at full speed it's only 2x or 3x faster, compared to Orion, and at the cost of being 2 times smaller. Also worth mentioning that large L1 cache didn't change and it's the main workforce of all K7 CPUs.

Thunderbird adds around 3% at 650 MHz up to 12% at 1000 MHz on Quake 3.
Fun fact, in Quake 1, in 640x480, the K7 1000 MHz is actually a little bit faster than the A0 1000 MHz (81 vs 78 FPS) 😁

(all this with super bypass, without it everything goes down a notch given the memory bottleneck)

sunaiac> That's really interesting. So a Thunderbird K7-700 at 833 MHz has about the same gaming performance as an Orion K7 at 1000 MHz. Thunderbird 700 MHz slot A's are cheap, while 1 GHz slot A's are expensive. I suppose the 1 GHz Orion or Thunderbird chips could have some advantage if an OEM board doesn't have any overclocking potential.

Actually it's nearly Thunderbird 1000 performance under quake 3 !
And I think the 833 is faster than the tbird 1000 under UT.

This system is starving FSB Mhz 😀

Very interesting, my board is the Aspen2, it's based on the sd-11 but I don't have any overclocking options.

candle_86 wrote on 2020-04-23, 12:15:

Very interesting, my board is the Aspen2, it's based on the sd-11 but I don't have any overclocking options.

I'd frankly not touch anything. If you happen to cross a third in the 800mhz range for peanuts then why not. Else there is really not practical difference after 700mhz on sdr, at least on amd750.

I had a socket a to slot A adapter, never got around to testing it since my slot a board became so flakey. Had to reseat the cpu and move memory around every time I fired it up, some of the pci slots were inop. Onboard fan connections were inop as well .
I still have the board and 750mhz tbird that came with it.

Ah what I did to save cash on my daily driver

rmay635703 wrote on 2020-04-23, 12:45:

I had a socket a to slot A adapter

where did you get that from? that has to be the rarest thing ever, I don't think they ever got released.

I feel your dilemma. Got a 650Mhz and I get my kicks out of maxing out systems.
But prices for anything over 700's are more then I wan't to pay and 50Mhz seems bit pointless.
Seems I'm stuck in the 600's, my 2 dual slot 1 M/B's cant go above 600

yeah, my only slot A thunderbird is 700Mhz too, anything above that is just too expensive.

Maybe I'll find me a nice kt133 board and run a socket a third, those are cheap enough.

Plus I finally tracked down a nagging issue with it. It seems the board got a bios update to support over 64gb disks but it's buggy. It explains all the issues I have with it. Gonna order a promise controller for it or go sata controller haven't decided

imi wrote on 2020-04-23, 13:40:

rmay635703 wrote on 2020-04-23, 12:45:

I had a socket a to slot A adapter

where did you get that from? that has to be the rarest thing ever, I don't think they ever got released.

I got it in a lot of junk motherboards on eBay around 2002, never thought about it being rare.

rmay635703 wrote on 2020-04-23, 16:27:

imi wrote on 2020-04-23, 13:40:

rmay635703 wrote on 2020-04-23, 12:45:

I had a socket a to slot A adapter

where did you get that from? that has to be the rarest thing ever, I don't think they ever got released.

I got it in a lot of junk motherboards on eBay around 2002, never thought about it being rare.

exceedingly rare, they never worked right, very unstable and they where canceled if i remember correctly

I'm torn about actually building a Slot-A system even though I have all the parts including a couple Thunderbird 900Mhz that were in some computers that I picked up for free years ago because somebody was throwing them out.

I did modify a S939 Opteron heatpipe cooler to work on Slot-A CPUs and it keeps them nice and cool.. and this is on the older Slot-A Athlon CPUs. The cooler even clears all the RAM slots on the motherboard. Made me realize even more that the coolers we had back then were absolute trash.

I also have another cooler set aside to modify but never got around to it.

The really fun thing about Slot-A CPUs is that the actual CPU core was almost always a higher speed core sold in a lower speed CPU package. A lot of the 500Mhz ones were actually 650Mhz and then you just go up form there.. such as a 800Mhz to 850Mhz being sold as a 700Mhz. If you were real lucky, the L2 cache was the same speed or faster than the CPU core was meant to have.

Some of the less high end CPUs had faster L2 cache than the faster CPUs due to the cache divider needed for the higher clocked CPUs.

I never used the gold finger devices back in the day. I just did the resistor / jumper mods to change the voltage, multiplier, and cache divider.

candle_86 wrote on 2020-04-23, 16:17:

Maybe I'll find me a nice kt133 board and run a socket a third, those are cheap enough.

was there ever a KT133 slot A board?

nvm. I read that wrong ^^

imi wrote on 2020-04-23, 18:10:

candle_86 wrote on 2020-04-23, 16:17:

Maybe I'll find me a nice kt133 board and run a socket a third, those are cheap enough.

was there ever a KT133 slot A board?

nvm. I read that wrong ^^

Yes kt133, kt133a, and km133 I believe.

I did not find any

candle_86 wrote on 2020-04-23, 19:09:

imi wrote on 2020-04-23, 18:10:

candle_86 wrote on 2020-04-23, 16:17:

Maybe I'll find me a nice kt133 board and run a socket a third, those are cheap enough.

was there ever a KT133 slot A board?

nvm. I read that wrong ^^

Yes kt133, kt133a, and km133 I believe.

There was KX133 for Slot-A. KT and KM were for Socket-A