Introduction

AMD has continued to consolidate and demonstrate its leadership with the release of the AMD-760 chipset for AMD Athlon processors, supporting the new and evolutionary Double Data Rate (DDR) Synchronous (SDRAM), commonly know to us as DDR SDRAM. DDR SDRAM is a new memory technology that offers peak memory bandwidths up to 2.1GB/sec, and comes in two flavours, PC-1600 and PC-2100. The AMD-760 chipset has additional features which clearly make it stand out from the crowd; Ultra-DMA 100 support with downward compatibility for all existing Ultra-DMA 33/66 devices such as CD-ROMs, DVD-ROM, with total support for high-bandwidth Ultra-DMA 100 devices allowing peak transfer rates, without the normal bottleneck found in older devices; The latest and greatest 266MHz Front Side Bus (FSB),this increased from 200MHz and we hear you all gasping what then happens to our current Athlon 200MHz FSB processor?, simple AMD has ensured the backward compatibility of the processor, and hence it can be utilised without undue worry. Increasing the FSB was a natural progression once the new DDR support was included, along with 4x AGP and Ultra-DMA 100 the obvious bottlenecks have been removed for a top-notch performance based platform. We will take a closer look at the DDR platform combining the AMD Athlon 1.2GHz DDR (266MHz FSB) processor, DDR SDRAM and the AMD-760 chipset to establish its temerity.

How we carried out our test

Our objective was to test the performance, implementation, and stability of the AMD 1.2GHz Processor, AMD 760 Chipset. To achieve our objective, we used 3DMARK 2000, Content Creation Winstone 2000 and BAPCo's SYSmark 2000.

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