AMD Athlon 1GHz (OEM)

• Reviewed by: anesthetik

  Strengths: Fast compared to Intel Counterparts

  Weaknesses: Gets too hot, without thermal protection.

  Overall: The Athlon Thunderbird is a really nice processor. It has 128K L1 with 256K L2 built into the die, which is more than even Pentium 3 can handle. Pentium 3 only has 64K L1 and 256K L2, so the Athlon doesn't bottleneck as much as Intel's does. One problem I see with the processor is its safety capabilities. This processor will go into instant death if the heat sink is not mounted properly. Unlike Intel processors, which have covered their processors with thermal protection for quite a while now, AMD doesn't seem to care if their processors go into thermal death. That is something to take into consideration.