Wesley's Tool-Box

I've come up with an alternate message board here and I think this one is better than the first one.... The first one is too slow and requires a login, two things that this board is not, fortunately. One downside is that the menus are in Korean, but I think most of you won't have hard time figuring out what it means since most message board designs are so similar.

I thought I would never put this up, but since there's been talks about it, I decided to post a short review on Blue Duron and how it compared to a regular green Duron. A slight rearrangement of the site is also done so that future articles can be more easily added.

• Unlocking... Again

Yup! These chips are obviously locked. It's the time for the pencil unlocking again. I've posted a how-to page on this some time ago, so the people who are unfamiliar with what I'm saying can go there. I have, however, attempted to take a better picture on how the chip looks before and after the unlocking is done, so you can click on the above images for a bigger one and pay attention to the orange arrow.

Unlocking finished, I have attempted overclocking at various speeds.

CPU:	AMD Duron 650MHz (Both)
M/B:	Asus A7V (KT-133 Chipset)
Cooling:	Alpha PAL6035MUC Fan/Heatsink
RAM:	128MB x 2 Hyundai PC-133 SDRAM
Video:	SUMA GeForce2 GTS 32MB
OS:	Windows 2000 SP1
Else:	Classified ^_^

 

Speed	Config	Voltage	Green	Blue
650MHz	100 x 6.5	1.50V	Perfect	Perfect
700MHz	100 x 7.0	1.50V	Perfect	Perfect
735MHz	113 x 6.5	1.50V	Good	Perfect
750MHz	100 x 7.5	1.50V	Boot Stop	Good
800MHz	100 x 8.0	1.50V	POST Stop	Boot Stop
800MHz	100 x 8.0	1.70V	Perfect	Perfect
850MHz	100 x 8.5	1.80V	Perfect	Perfect
892MHz	105 x 8.5	1.80V	Boot Stop	Boot Stop
892MHz	105 x 8.5	1.85V	Perfect	Perfect
900MHz	100 x 9.0	1.85V	Good	Perfect
910MHz	107 x 8.5	1.85V	Good	Perfect
927MHz	103 x 9.0	1.85V	Boot Stop	Perfect
945MHz	105 x 9.0	1.85V	POST Stop	Good
950MHz	100 x 9.5	1.85V	POST Stop	Good
963MHz	107 x 9.0	1.85V	No POST	Boot Stop
1000MHz	100 x 10.0	1.85V	No POST	POST Stop

Perfect = No Crashes Whatsoever
Good = Benchmark Crashes and Freezes Occasionally on Normal Use
Boot Stop = Computer Crashes During Boot or Immediately After Boot
POST Stop = Computer Crashes Before POST finishes
No POST = Cannot Boot At All

• Blue IS Better

As the table shows, while the GREEN one hit the ceiling at 892MHz, the BLUE one had no problems up to 927MHz. The latter even showed me 1000MHz on the screen... I think I may try a voltage boost some time to get that 1GHz mark. For now, though, I think I'll stay at this point. BLUE chip overclocking 5.4% higher than the GREEN chip at the same condition is not too shabby.

You should note that the GREEN chip showed almost an identical overclockability as the original green Duron shown at the pencil unlocking article, if you click here. In fact, I almost thought the new green Duron was my old dead one.

But this isn't the end of the story - the two green Durons that went through my hands were all made in WEEK 25, while reports of the blue Durons reveal that they are either of WEEK 27, like mine, or WEEK 22. From this, I think the logical explanations for all this could be either...

1. The blue Durons are somehow made in Dresden, defying the current knowledge. The copper interconnects contributed to the better overclockability of the blue type compared to the green type.

2. The blue Durons are from Austin, but on week 27, they had to use a different polish. The better overclockability may be from the better bin-splits that week had.

Some other speculations are possible, of course. What's your take on the issue? How did your 'blue' Durons fare compared to the 'green' Durons? Let me hear it at my new message board! Click below!

P.S. No, I did not post a benchmark comparing the two.... I thought it's pointless to do it... but if many of you want it, maybe I'll post it.

• I had a Crush(?) on Duron

Durons are fragile.. Durons are fragile.. uh..? To confess, I was not being 'nice' to my Duron. Guess what? It died a painful death... yes... I knew those weird sounds were not good..... The Duron you saw in the last article is no more, sadly.

Why am I saying that there? Because that 'incident' had apparently left me with two Durons for a while.

Confused? You see, because that Duron 'failed', I had sent it back for a replacement. Wonderful replacement policy at that shop I bought the chip, I tell you. While I was waiting for the replacement to arrive, I had to run the machine anyways, so I got another Duron. I was back on track. And after a few days, the replacement finally came. I pulled out the Duron from the system...

• Duron on Blue

The surface of the two Durons actually differed! The pictures above were not taken at the same time of the day (sorry about that) but you can clearly see the blue tint on the edges of the core on the right chip while the left chip is generally greenish all around. The 'blue' one was the replacement chip, by the way.

The bluish-greenish tint difference is well-known in the Thunderbird chips. The bluish one is the one from Dresden, and thus using the newer 'copper interconnect' process, while the greenish one comes from Austin, using the normal 'aluminium interconnect' process. The process itself does not account for the colour; rather, the two fabrications use the different polishes and the resulting tint gets different.

Trouble is, Durons are known to be manufactured only at Austin, so normally, Durons are 'green'. But with this 'blue' Duron now at my hand, one would have to wonder what's going on. There's a lot of debate on whether it's really coming from Dresden and using copper interconnects or not, but I just decided to put the two to the test.

What test? Overclocking, of course! Since copper interconnects are known to have better yields of high speed grades, it is possible that the 'blue' one would overclock better than the 'green' one.

I've activated a message board system for this site and WDSoft.com so less people would bug me with e-mails.