Now I am going to talk about the new Tbreds for those of you who do not know about them. The "thouroughbred" (did i spell that right lol) shortened to Tbred is the new .13u process of the Athlon. There are two versions, the Tbred rev A which runs from 1600+-2200+ and the Tbred rev B which runs from 2400+-2800+.
The Cpu's require 1.65v to go into them rather than the old 1.75v.
First I will discuss the rev A tbreds. It is somewhat hard to find any other version than 2200+ of these (however now you can find a 1700+ and 1800+ at newegg). Amd supposidly had been producing only tbreds in their factories for a few months but not many have been seen on the streets. I am sure most people are wondering, well how do these perform? Well pretty darn well actually if you have the correct cooling. These things run HOT because of the small die area. Especially if you overclock them. Other than the smaller .13u size there is no difference performance wise between them and their older brother the palomino.
Like stated above Tbred Rev A overclocking is ok. If you have very good cooling, like Pelt or Phase change, it is pretty good tho. It is not uncommon to see people with these extreme cooling methods runnin at 2.3ghz+ with them (the record overclock for a 2200+ is 2.7ghz and was cooled w/ LN2). However, if you are using a Air cooler, you will generally see 200-300mhz more out of them just like on the Pallys. However, like i said earlier, it is extremely hard to find tbreds in less than 2200+ brands. Most people who had them ordered them off of internet forums off of people.
The Tbred Rev B is a brand new core and was made by AMD to help the heating problems and allow higher clock speeds. I cannot recall how they fixed the prob (someone wanna fill in?) but i remember it has somethin to do w/ adding another layer to the core. Anywho, the Tbred Rev B starts at 2400+ (unless AMD coverts lesser CPU's which i doubt they will) which is 2ghz clock speed. The 2400+ and 2600+ still use the 133mhz FSB (266ddr) (the 2600+ has a 166mhz verison as well) so if you are not going to overclock all you need to buy is DDR2100 ram still which is pretty cheap. However, who doesnt overclock here
Now the 2600+,2700+ and 2800+ cpus use the 166mhz FSB which is DDR 333. This significantly increases the bandwith you get and hence will increase system performance. These can be purchased
NOW from Newegg however they are very expensive. the stepping on these new processors are AIUGB and so far have proven to be quite a bit better than the older AIUCB stepping. Most of the AIUGB's do 2.4-2.6ghz on air cooling alone and up to 2.8ghz w/ pelts. In other words, if you can afford to get one of these new processors, get em!
Overclocking the Tbred B has gotten much better than overclocking on the Tbred A. So far there are two steppings, AIUCB and AIUGB. If you have a AIUCB you can expect around 300mhz and if you have a AIUGB 400mhz or even more out of your cpu.
Lets just hope the bartons will get here soon but i doubt they will come before Feb 2003.
Finally it is pretty unsafe to run the voltage on these CPUs over 1.9v because of the small die size so dont attempt to do it. currently there has been no reports of tbred A's dieing of high voltage but pentium 4's which also use .13u are dieing left and right!
once again if there are any questions feel free to ask. if there is anything i forgot feel free to add.
EDITED AND UPDATED
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