Review: AMD's DDR chipset and the new Athlon

AMD's 760 chipset for DDR-SDRAM is ready to go. At the same time, three Athlon models with a faster FSB clock will be launched. A dual turbocharger for Athlon PCs? tecChannel.de tested one of the first mainboards with DDR-SDRAM and the new Athlon CPU.

The AMD 750 chipset for PC100-SDRAM was blessed with a long life. Now, almost two years later, AMD launches the AMD 760 as a successor to their processors with DDR-SDRAM support to enter the race.

AMD launches three new Athlon versions at the same time in order to enable users to utilize the full bandwidth of the AMD 760 and the faster memory clock: the new Athlons offer a clock speed of 1000, 1133, and 1200 MHz and an FSB clock of 266 MHz instead of 200 MHz.

The fact that the DDR-SDRAM really facilitates a considerable boost in performance was already proven by the VIA Apollo Pro266 for Intel processors, which tecChannel.de tested - the english review is here. The expectations to be fulfilled by AMD's 760-DDR chipset therefore are just as high. Due to the increase in the processors' FSB clock speed, the Athlon should - at least in theory - be able to utilize the DDR-SDRAM even better than the Pentium III.

tecChannel.de tested one of the first mainboards with the AMD 760 chipset as well as a 1.2 GHz Athlon with the FSB clocked at 266 MHz.