AMD Athlon 850

Conclusion

The Athlon 850 isn't anything special, it's just another Athlon with a higher clock speed, doesn't that conclusion sound all too familiar? It should, it's the same conclusion we normally come to whenever a manufacturer simply releases a higher speed grade processor. But at the same time, we always take this opportunity to look at the market as a whole and point out any helpful tips we ran across during our tests.

The Athlon platform has received sort of a rebirth with the release of VIA's KX133 chipset, while it was getting increasingly painful to watch AMD get hammered because of their 2/5 speed L2 cache, the Athlon was quickly approaching the not-recommended status simply because the Pentium III was offering greater performance at a competitive price. However, the recent price drops on AMD's part as well as the Intel CPU shortages have turned the tables in this heated competition.

The Athlon CPUs are enjoying some very nice yields, and thus the overclocking potential of these CPUs is something to be appreciated. Those users that are looking for a reasonably priced CPU that they can overclock to get even more performance out of should consider the Athlon, especially since they are now cheaper than their equally overclockable FC-PGA counterparts in the Intel world.

Gamers could go either way, with the Pentium III coming out on top of the Athlon in most gaming benchmarks the decision would normally be easy for those interested in obtaining the highest frame rates. But because of availability issues as well as cost factors, the Athlon becomes a much more intelligent purchase than the Pentium III for those of us that aren't blessed with an unlimited budget for computer upgrades. On a clock for clock basis, the Athlon is close enough to the Pentium III in gaming performance for the price difference to be a much more valid concern than a few frames here or there.

Business and Content Creation application users should be fine either way, with the Athlon being the more available and cheaper chip at this point the final decision would be up to you but don't be surprised if you end up leaning towards the Athlon when the time to write the final check comes.

The biggest surprise is the Athlon's improved NT/OpenGL performance with the KX133 chipset. For professional OpenGL applications, the Athlon is the ideal solution if and only if it is paired up with a KX133 motherboard, purchasing an AMD 750 based motherboard right now isn't a sound investment if you're looking for competitive professional level OpenGL performance under NT. The SPECviewperf benchmarks illustrate a noticeable difference in performance between the AMD 750 with SuperBypass enabled and the KX133 platforms.

The only concern we had with the Athlon 850 was the amount of power it draws, which should be a little higher than 50W. Considering that the fastest Pentium IIIs currently draw no more than 30W, we are looking at one very power hungry chip. Without proper support, the Athlon 850 could cause a definite strain on some motherboards that weren't designed for use with the chip.

As the war wages on, AMD manages to come away from this battle fairly strong in spite of the fact that the Athlon still doesn't have an on-die L2 cache running at clock speed. While AMD had demonstrated an Athlon with exactly that just a few days ago, it will be a little while longer until those CPUs make their way into the hands of the consumer. Until then, the Athlon is still a strong platform, as long as you choose your motherboard (and chipset), memory, power supply and other components properly you should be able to construct a very reliable and very quick system based on AMD's greatest to date.