whats so good about the 1600+ ?

forgive my newbieness as i've had a p4 sys for a while now but am looking to upgrade to an athlon sys and get into overclocking

i've noticed a dissproportionate amout of you guys seem to have 1600+ chips and have read remarks on how good they overclock, i was wondering what is it specifically about this chip that makes it such a good overclocker and also are all 1600+ 's created equal?

so if i buy a 1600+ am i guaranteed of a good o/c??? or should i play it safe and spend more for guaranteed performance out of the box with a 2100+?

by the way i am looking at getting an epox 8k5a2 and either kingmax or corsiar ram (2700 or 3200 i'm not sure yet)

any help would be appreciated

- ben

XP's

The reason the 1600+ is so good, is that it has a low stock multiplyer, 10.5. With this low multiplyer, it is possible to overclock the FSB up to 166-175 on kt333 motherboards, without unlocking. Whereas all other XP's except the 1500+ have higher mutliplyers and require unlocking to get good FSB speeds. Unless you have a good 1600+ or are willing to unlock, a kt333 chipset is pretty much worthless as the XP's don't have the potential to go much higher than 1.8 Ghz on air-cooling in most cases. 2100+ are extra hard to unlock compared to their lower-speed brethren, avoid them if you value FSB and memory bandwidth.

Not all XP's are created equal. the good ones have "agoia" or "aroia" printed on the cpu core. They are the batches with good potential.

And even if you bought a 2100+, a decent 1600+ stepping would still over more, I think.

The AGOIA or AROIA will be a lot cheaper and o/c just as well or better than the XP2100+.

What exactly is better about the XP1600 than other XPs I do not know. I am an Overclocker, not an electronics engineer and will freely admit that all the details leave me scratching my head!

But- I have owned a few XP chips(in order of ownership):
XP1800
XP1600
XP1700
XP1700
XP1600

All were unlocked successfully.
The first two are now dead, but both were early chips (last fall.)
None were great steppings except the last 1600

The XP1800 made it to 1.7, barely
First XP1600 made it to 1650 easily, and made it to 1750 before it died

The two XP1700s both run at 1710 right now, and will do 1750/1800 with better psus than I am using.

The XP1600 (agoia Y 02/13) has done 2ghz but is kep lower because the overall system benches MUCH better at 1940 or so.

The later XPs seem to just be a better cpu: they fine tuned the manufacturing process, I guess.

And they perform better than 1800s- how many of them have hit 2ghz, or close to that, and run 24/7? Not many.