AMD DURON 600
The Duron 600 marks AMDÆs attempt to break into the low- and medium-range processor market, and break CeleronÆs outright domination in this value conscious segment. It has a 200 MHz front side bus as compared to the 66 MHz that Celeron runs at. For benchmarking the software, the test machine had a Geforce2 GTS graphics card, 128 MB RAM and an ASUS A7V motherboard.
It out-performed the Celeron in all the benchmarks and it almost gave its high-value segment processor, the Athlon, a serious run for its money. In Ziff-Davis Content Creation 2000, it achieved a score of 23.4, as compared to the 26.7 rating of Athlon 600 and 23.3 of Celeron 600. For the real-world gaming benchmark, we ran Quake 3 on the Duron 600 at a resolution of 640x480 at 16-bit colour. With normal settings, the Duron 600 achieved 85 frames per second (fps), while an equivalent Celeron canÆt even touch the magic 80 fps figure.
Value conscious users, both at home or office, should definitely take a close look at this latest offering from AMD. The processor performs quite well, especially for the gaming segment and office applications.