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Thoroughbred OCing

A quick look at what the 1800+ TBred might get you with the right cooling.

We were lucky enough to get our hands on few of AMD's new 1800+ CPUs based on the Thoroughbred core. With AMD's recent release of the new core at 1.8GHz, the chip was not greeted warmly by the enthusiast crowd as its overclocking abilities were nearly nonexistent except for a couple of instances. We were able to overclock our 2200+ to over 2GHz but only with the use of water cooling. Overall it seems that 100MHz OCs are about all the 2200+ is giving up currently. A new CPU core is always greeted with great OC hopes and many times they live up to them.

While AMD did release their new flagship CPU based on the Thoroughbred core, they have also done a few other things that have not been talked about so much, those things being the 1700+, 1800+, and 1900+. Yes, these famous Palominos are all grown up and now Thoroughbreds. New cores with "old" CPUs often are the best combination. The most recent example that is easy to point out is the Intel Pentium 4 1.6A that is not uncommonly found at 2.1GHz and above. Sometimes way above.

Not to drone on any longer we wanted to share with you what our 1800+ TBred was capable of.

Our 1800+ is one of six samples sent to us by AMD for a giveaway coming up soon. We simply picked one at random to test. All the 1800+ parts we got were produced in week 14 of 2002 and carry an "AIRCA" marking on them.

We tested the 1800+ on our EPoX 8K3A+ KT333 mainboard at 1.85 Vcore and Corsair XMS300 DDR Ram.

As you can see from the above images we were able to successfully run our CPU at 1.83GHz (10*183). Not only were we able to get in and take a couple of screen shots, we were able to run a whole suite of benchmark tests with the CPU proving to be completely stable at over the "2200+" rating. These benchmarks will be in our EPoX 8K3A+ mainboard review and we will directly compare them to a stock 2200+ and I can tell you that you will not be disappointed.

Still we wanted to go faster and got our TBred into an WinXP OS at over 1.9GHz but it was far from stable. Once we managed to get the TBred into Windows at over 2GHz but that seemed to be luck. I don't doubt that our CPU will run at 2GHz, but it is going to take some hefty cooling to pull it off and in that I am talking about methods to bring it down below ambient.

Our overclocking was all done on the EPoX 8K3A+ at 1.85 Vcore using an Alpha PAL 8045 cooler. This was the same setup that we used in the Thermalright SLK-800 review. Realizing that not everyone is going to have such a high dollar cooling setup, we started bringing down the CFMs in order to bring the temperature up. We could run our 1.53GHz part stable at 155F at 1.83GHz without issue.

But what about using a more mainstream cooler?