Athlon or Thunderbird - Ways to tell apart?

[Robert Smith]

When I bought my this computer back in December, I'm sure I got and AMD Thunderbird 800Mhz put in. Yet in all of the benchmark programs I use and under System Properties, if says I have an AMD Athlon 800Mhz. How can I tell which one I have short of opening the thing up as my dad won't let me void the warranty :(

And anyway, what is the difference between the two as they are both the same speed?

Ta

[Paul -The Mad Hatter]

some times programes reconize the thunderbird as an athlon cuz its an athlon thunderbird. The thunderbird has faster L2 cache then the classic athlon.

[minoukat]

The thunderbird has on-die L2 cache, like the L1, working at full speed (ie: if you have a TBird 800MHz, your L2 cache will work at 800MHz, versus I think 1/2 speed with athlon classic). And I am not sure, but I think Athlon Classic has more L2 than tbird : classic has 512 KB of L2 cache, and TBird has 256KB, but as tbird's cache is working faster, it's more efficient, and more performant !

Almost forgot, Welcome to the forums !!!

[TC]

Download CPU ID from here:

Hoda (http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA002374/)

Run the utility and it will tell you what you have - there will be 256K of full speed L2 cache if it's a thunderbird core.

[Tomas]

Originally posted by Robert Smith
When I bought my this computer back in December, I'm sure I got and AMD Thunderbird 800Mhz put in. Yet in all of the benchmark programs I use and under System Properties, if says I have an AMD Athlon 800Mhz. How can I tell which one I have short of opening the thing up as my dad won't let me void the warranty :(

And anyway, what is the difference between the two as they are both the same speed?

Ta

An thunderbird is an athlon!! Thunderbird is just the codename for the cpu.