Practically everyone in the PC hardware scene today will have heard of the AMD Duron and its 'legendary' overclockability and speed. Often beating Intel Coppermine CPUs at equivalent clockspeeds, the Duron has become one of the most sought after choice of upgrade.

In my personal opinion, the name AMD has become synonymous with the word OVERCLOCKING. With the advent of the Athlon CPUs and the discovery of how overclockable the CPUs were, hardware enthusiasts and newbies alike rushed to own one, all for "free" MHz. WHo wouldn't want to buy a CPU rated for say, 650MHz, and run it at 900MHz; thus only paying for 650MHz but getting the extra 250MHz literally for free.

One of the main plus points of the Duron solution is that the Duron costs much less than Intel CPUs at equivalent clockspeeds. For instance, the Duron 650 would go for roughly RM 170 (USD 45) whereas the Celeron costs RM 339 (USD 89). The Pentium III-700 goes for roughly RM 500 (USD 132), providing you can still find any.

The major downside of getting a Duron-based system is that you will have to get a Socket A motherboard which is considerably more expensive than Intel compatible motherboards. Socket A motherboards from the likes of MSI, ASUS and ABIT go for RM 350 (USD 92) to over RM 500 (USD 132). On the other hand, Socket 370 motherboards go for maybe RM 300-400 (USD 79-105).

In addition, you will also need to get better RAM to go with your Duron system as some AMD motherboards tend to appreciate the use of better quality SDRAM. Generic SDRAM should work, providing you don't try to push the RAM to run any faster than its specifications. Preferably, one should use quality PC133 SDRAM as it has become a common feature for AMD motherboards to run FSB speeds and SDRAM speeds independently.

Okay, here's a little bit on the architecture and design of the Duron CPU in general. If you feel you've read this before, then feel free to skip it. Basically, AMD took the core of the classic Athlon CPU and moved it to the 0.18 micron process, obviously allowing higher clockspeeds in a smaller package. The L2 cache was reduced to 64KB but it could now run at full speed because it was fully integrated into the CPU die.

The L1 cache was retained at 128KB so the total cache size of the Duron became 192KB. One important speed enhancing feature of the Duron's cache is that the cache is mutually exclusive, in the sense that whatever data that's in the L1 cache isn't duplicated in the L2 cache.

As with all Athlon CPUs, the Duron also retains the 200MHz EV6 memory bus. But the Duron is limited to only Socket A motherboards. In the early stages of design, the Duron was actually codenamed 'Spitfire'. Eventually, they took two Latin words, 'Durare' meaning 'lasting', and 'On' meaning 'unit' and combined the two together to come up with the name 'Duron', literally meaning 'lasting unit'.