Introduction

Since the original AMD Athlon was released last year I've always wanted one... PC INDEX Australia must have heard me calling because they have supplied us with a AMD Athlon "Thunderbird" 700MHz SLOT A CPU, FIC SD11 motherboard, Free Speed Pro GFD and a big whooping air cooler for some reviewage here @ TT. Our test unit FIC SD11 motherboard didn't at all justify the power and performance of the AMD Athlon "Thunderbird". This is simply due to the FIC SD11 having a lowly AMD 751 "Irongate" chipset with only AGP 1x support with GeForce cards (AGP 2x unstable). FIC isn't to blame for this (well not directly anyway) it's the Northbridge chipset which is causing all the problems. It seems also that this Irongate chipset doesn't support Sound Blaster Vibra ISA cards, since we're not reviewing the FIC SD11 motherboard we'll carry on with the AMD Athlon "Thunderbird" 700MHz review, which you came to read...

Batch and Manufacturing Dates

Each AMD Athlon "Thunderbird" is equipped with the following set of batch and manufacturing dates... Below is a picture and what they stand for:

AMD= Advanced Micro Devices

A0= Athlon Other

700M= Speed of the CPU (in this case 700MHz)

PR24= cache system

B= CPU revision (A is socket A, B is slot A

The numbers at the bottom are manufacturing and batch dates.