VIA Cyrix III 533, 600MHz (1/4)

VIA Cyrix III Logo

The CPU industry for IBM compatible (or non-Mac) personal computers was pioneered by, and still dominated by Intel, the creator of modern microprocessors. Many companies have tried to take a bite out of this ever-growing market with varying success. The most prominent competitors were Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Cyrix. These two companies gained notable market shares by attacking value-oriented low-end segment of the industry in the last few years.

Even though Intel tried to cut off the competition by suddenly moving to Slot1 design for processors in 1997, AMD and Cyrix improved the Socket7 design thrown away by Intel to come up with 'Super7', which became a viable and cost-effective alternative to Slot1 and the two companies remained competitive. Seeing their little success in the low-end, many companies like Centaur and Rise sprang up to provide their own version of the Super7 processors.

Unfortunately, though, in 1999, nearly all of the competitors to Intel faced collapse due to many factors such as aging of the Super7 platform and problems with ramping up speed or production target. Cyrix and Centaur was eventually bought by Taiwan's VIA Technologies and Rise switched their target market to internet appliances, disappearing from the PC scene. AMD was on the verge of bankruptcy while their K6-III had trouble producing in volume. That's how Cyrix, Centaur, and Rise virtually disappeared. But...

In case of AMD, however, their unusually high devotion to R&D department in the last couple of years had paid off, and their K7 processor, renamed and now known as Athlon, was able to meet or surpass Intel's high-end offering, the Pentium III on both performance and price-competitiveness. Because of this chip and its siblings that followed such as Duron and 'Thunderbird', AMD made a strong comeback and is now viewed as a significant competitor to Intel. This trend is still picking up the pace - the latest additions to this include Intel's 2000 Q3 earnings warning in which many are thinking that AMD's gain in the market share played a significant role.

So what we are now seeing is that the PC industry is enjoying a true 'duopoly' of Intel and AMD, the two companies' combined market share being more than 99%. The two companies have almost the same line-up of ultra high-end to value low-end processors already in mass production or going into production in a few months, thus overlapping each other in every aspect and having fierce competition. All the while the other PC processor companies remained in virtual silence....

Until now.

VIA Cyrix III Box

 

What you see above is a VIA Cyrix III 600MHz processor in a plastic box that goes inside the retail package. The hollow area on the right of the box is where the heatsink/fan goes in. I was shocked to see this handed to me for a review because I've not heard of Cyrix much since it was absorbed by VIA more than a year ago. I did hear about this chip occasionally, but it was constantly being delayed that I thought I would almost forget about it. This product is going to be available on the market almost immediately, so I can pretty much say that Cyrix has finally made a comeback. It is quite evident that, because of all the spotlight being focused at Intel and AMD, Cyrix's re-entry was rather quiet.

Duron: Green vs Blue (2/2)

Green Duron Blue Duron
Before... After!

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


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. :-)

Duron: Green vs Blue (1/2)

Durons Side by Side

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...
Green Duron Blue Duron
'Green' Duron, Week 25 'Blue' Duron, Week 27

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.

Unlocking Aftermath (2/2)

My Duron 650MHz Remember this chip from my previous article? This is a Duron 650MHz. I chose Duron over Thunderbird because of overclockability. The high quality of the AMD chips ensure a fair amount of overclocking already, but Duron's default voltage is 1.5V as opposed to Thunderbird's 1.7V. Since the maximum voltage setting for Socket A is generally 1.85V, Duron has better headroom for overclocking as higher voltage generally helps the chip operating in higher speed provided that a suitable cooling solution is present. Many hardware sites have confirmed that this voltage headroom does indeed help Duron become a good overclocking chip, getting more than 200MHz faster speed in most cases.

Duron's average speed is only about one speed grade (50MHz) lower than Thunderbird and depending on the applications Durons and Thunderbirds perform pretty much the same. Hearing about the overclockability of Duron, I concluded that I had little to lose in performance and a lot to gain from overclocking, saving money in the end. I looked for the local availability of Duron and 650MHz was the only choice. I bought it, only to discover its locked state. That didn't matter for too long, as I was able to unlock it anyway. Now I just needed to see how far the chip would go...
CPU: AMD Duron 650MHz
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 Status
650MHz 100 x 6.5 1.50V Perfect
700MHz 100 x 7.0 1.50V Perfect
735MHz 113 x 6.5 1.50V Good
750MHz 100 x 7.5 1.50V Boot Stop
800MHz 100 x 8.0 1.50V POST Stop
800MHz 100 x 8.0 1.70V Perfect
850MHz 100 x 8.5 1.80V Perfect
1000MHz 100 x 10.0 1.85V No POST
950MHz 100 x 9.5 1.85V POST Stop
900MHz 100 x 9.0 1.85V Good
910MHz 107 x 8.5 1.85V Good
892MHz 105 x 8.5 1.80V Boot Stop
892MHz 105 x 8.5 1.85V Perfect

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


As you can notice up there, I had 1 GHz mark in my mind. Unfortunately, my chip wasn't able to break that. 900MHz was not as stable as I wanted either. But at 892MHz, with the maximum voltage possible, it was as stable as the initial 650MHz speed due to good cooling provided by Alpha fan/heatsink combo. After further analysis, speed of up to 935MHz would have been possible with 1.90V setting. But 1.85V of 892MHz setting is scary enough anyways, so I decided not to hack the voltage controls. Now for some benchmarks.
Benchmark 650MHz 892MHz Change
d.net
client
RC5 Long, core#6
(MKeys/s)
2.230 3.083 +38.3%
Sandra
2000
7.6.49
Dhrystone (MIPS) 1855 2545 +37.2%
Whetstone (MFLOPS) 876 1241 +41.7%
MMX (it/s) 2150 2960 +37.7%
3DNow! (it/s) 2751 3781 +37.4%
Memory ALU
(MB/s)
423 442 +4.5%
Memory FPU
(MB/s)
531 553 +4.1%

As expected, synthetic benchmarks reflect the exact increases in clock speed as well as the FSB. Mathematical increase of clock speed from 650MHz to 892.5MHz is 37.3% and most of the results mirror this within margin of error. As for the memory categories, speed increase of 5% in memory from increasing FSB was mirrored in the results as well.

If you're into RC5 code cracking with distributed.net client like me(or my team), you can see that you'll get a very efficient cracking machine (over 3 million keys cracked in a second!) without big investment when you buy a Duron system. :-)
Benchmark 650MHz 892MHz Change
3DMark 2000 Overall
(1024x768 16bit)
3975 4665 +17.4%
Quake3
Arena
v1.11
(fps)
640x480 HQ 98.5 116.2 +18.0%
800x600 HQ 96.1 110.7 +15.2%
1024x768 HQ 83.0 86.3 +4.0%
1280x1024 HQ 50.0 50.2 +0.4%
1600x1200 HQ 33.4 33.4 0.0%

Overclocking to 892MHz also brought up the scores and frame rates nicely. The memory bandwidth becomes a big problem for resolutions equal to or higher than 1024x768, so high resolutions don't benefit much from CPU overclocking, but it does help a lot in lower resolutions.

If you've run 3DMark 2000 on your own a lot, you'll notice that the score is quite low for a 900~MHz CPU with GeForce2 GTS. I think this is generally because 3DMark runs slower in Windows 2000 than in Windows 98, but examining details revealed that something else may be holding back the score. Nevertheless, it did effectively show how the overclocking helped increase the score.

What a difference a pencil makes. :-) By unlocking the CPU that was destined to run only at around 650MHz, I could get a noteworthy performance increase out of it at virtually no cost. A lot of heat was generated while operating at 892MHz, but Alpha PAL6035 was good enough to lower the temperature to acceptable level. You should also note Duron's high overclockability - rock-stable while running at more than 37% the original speed. While it fell a little short of the magical 50% overclock achieved by the legenday Celeron 300A or more recently, Celeron 566, I do not doubt that it would certainly compete well in the overclocked performance arena with its Intel counterpart, 'Celemine(FC-PGA Celeron)'. Now I need to get some sleep...

Unlocking Aftermath (1/2)


After posting the initial unlocking article involving pencil, many positive responses came although I had wondered if the results were reproduced in a favourable manner. It seems that this is indeed the case; a good example is this posting from HardOCP on August 3rd in their Fifth Edition posts.
 

This is what Hard|OCPer Patrick has to say about the Unlocking the Socket A CPUs with a Pencil.

Just wanted to let you know, that you can unlock the TBird w/ a normal #2 pencil by just going over the L1 bridges a few times. I got mine in yesterday, and it worked perfectly. Just thought I would let ya know it worked...


Then just when you thought you have heard the last of it. (which I seriously doubt) Another Hard|OCPer busts out with incredible close-ups of his mechanical pencil microsurgery.  Don't you need a license for that??


all i used was a .7mm mechanical pencil. thanks pin0yclocker



 

Some new questions popped up. Most of them seem to be generally questioning the safety of the method further. Here are the Q&As that may help you.

Q: Doesn't the pencil markings gradually fall off and become a trouble?

[A]: This is not likely. Mr. Nam of South Korea noted in the guest book entry #134 that even with his heatsink-fan that has serious vibrating conditions, the markings are holding on well. Also, even in the rare chance of the markings falling off to the point that it becomes ineffective to connect the bridge while the computer is on, the normal CPU operation will not be affected (the system won't freeze) since the multiplier setting is detected only at the boot time and is not used while in normal use.

Q: I still don't like the possibility of this 'falling-off'. What are the ways to prevent this effectively?

[A]: You should try to put on a thin layer of cover on top of the markings. Nail polish seems to be a good choice, since applying it, as well as clearing it off is easy. Lacquer is another possibility, though it would be more permanent than nail polish. Neither of the suggestions have not been reported to have been actually tested, so try it at your own risk. Tapes, like scotch tapes may not be good since the chip gets hot and the adhesive may become messy or lose its stickiness.

Q: How about the markings getting mixed up with the heatsink compound?

[A]: The heatsink compounds are not supposed to be on the markings in the first place. Socket A processors are of FC-PGA type, meaning that the core sticks out of its ceramic casing. Thus the heatsink compound is supposed to be on the core area only and never anywhere else. But if the heatsink compound does ever touch them, nothing should happen unless the compound is conductive(which isn't a good choice).

What's the whole point of unlocking a chip? Overclocking, of course! It's clear that a person reading this article is expecting to overclock his/her Socket A chip (Duron and Thunderbird Athlon all apply) or at least looking at the possibility of doing it. This is what happened in my quest of overclocking.

Copyright (C) 1996-2024 Woo-Duk Chung (Wesley Woo-Duk Hwang-Chung). All rights reserved.