AMD Athlon XP2400+ M

     When it comes to distinguishing the real overclocking websites out there, ClubOC tries hard to stay in touch with the latest and greatest hardware roaming the internet. Whether if its rev 1.2 motherboards, or the newest line of modules and where to get them, you can count on us to try our hardest to procure the latest rage. On a more personal level being a hardware reviewer has its merits and sometimes its just nice to get an email from one of our viewers. About two weeks ago I got an email from a friend I've known for at least three years or more, stating that he knew where to get unlocked AMD CPU's for next to nothing that would do incredible speeds. He backed this up with a few screenshots of his own AMD hitting over 2.6Ghz using nothing more than a good air-cooling arrangement, and lots of voltage adjustments. I was more than curious why he was so persistent, so I starting using my favorite search engine, Google of course, to see where in the heck was he getting these numbers, and most of all where he purchased his CPU. After a week of continuing to receive emails from my buddy, I decided enough was enough, and ask him to cut out the BS and tell me where he got his chip. His prompt reply was Newegg, of course... The hard part about being a hardware reviewer is sometimes you have to fish cash out of your own pocket to please the masses. So as I was on the phone with my friend I decided to go ahead and grab one of these babies to see what it would do on water. Little did I know that the CPU I would be purchasing is for use in a notebook!

The AMD "Barton" XP2400-M

Specifications

• 0.13-micron process technology—Provides further thermal
headroom necessary to scale frequency within the thermal limits of
mobile platforms for AMD processors, thus maximizing overall
processor performance
• AMD PowerNow!™ technology—Industry’s first dynamic powermanagement
solution to optimize notebook system battery life while
delivering performance on demand
• 512KB L2 cache—Increases the performance of applications such as
high-end gaming and digital media by keeping more frequently
accessed instructions and data close to the CPU.
QuantiSpeed™ architecture:
• Nine-issue, superscalar, fully pipelined microarchitecture—
Provides a wide executing bandwidth to improve overall productivity
• Superscalar, fully pipelined FPU—Increasing performance of
floating point-intensive applications while offering 3DNow! Professional
technology support
• Hardware data prefetch—Increasing performance on high-end
software applications using high-bandwidth system capability,
especially with DDR memory
• TLB enhancements—Increasing performance of high-end, dataintensive
applications
…AMD continues to accelerate technology innovations while meeting the
computationally intensive requirements of software applications including:
• 3D applications—3D modeling, high-end gaming, etc.
• Multimedia/digital content creation applications—Photo and
video editing, video encoding and decoding, image compression, soft
DVD, MP3 encoding and decoding, etc.
• High-end applications—Digital publishing, speech recognition, CAM,
digital prototyping, etc.

Performance

The Test System is as follows:

DangerDen Maze 4 CPU/GPU/Z-Block water cooling w/ BIX-2
AMD Athlon XP2400-M
DFI Infinity Ultra "A" 2-17 "bo2 beta" BIOS
Mushkin Level 2 Black BH-5 2x512 Dual Channel
PNY FX5900 NU
Enermax 465VE 430W PSU
Lian Li PC-75
Mylex accelaRAID 170 w/ 3x35gb X-15 in RAID 0+3

     The major point of this setup is to see how far we can take this processor to see if its really worth Neweggs asking price of a measly $80. In a matter of days after ordering my processor it was here. I immediately took into consideration that you never, ever replace a CPU without pulling the plug out of the PSU, since 3 years ago I fried a processor when my system powered up as soon as I put it in the ZIF. Using AS Ceramic on the CPU, we tightened down the Maze 4 CPU Block and turned it on. The weird thing is that it came up as a default 800mhz CPU. This is due to the Infinity desktop motherboard not "officially supporting" a mobile processor. Well we aren't really interested in what AMD thinks is official, since this CPU is so cheap it would be no biggie to just make a nice .mpg of it on fire.

1.85vcore

     With the FX at 480/938 and the FSB at a measly 225mhz running 11-2-2-2-2 timings at 3.0v, we managed just under 20k. Not bad for no volt mods and a $200 video card.

1.95vcore

     I would say this processor is well worth the $79 asking price that Newegg wants. You may notice that a 3dmark is missing. Its either due to the board or the AGP latency. We are still trying to figure out all the BIOS options on this motherboard to get it to run over 240 FSB effectively. We actually lost points on a 3DMark run at this speed. but hopefully down the road the DFI engineers will continue to tweak this board to take advantage of its native high-FSB capability. GO grab one of these processors all you AMD 32bit fans, its the end of an era, but at least we still have locked PCI and AGP speeds...