Re: Duron or Athlon Classic

The Athlon Classic has 512 KB L2 cache running at a fraction of the core speed. With the 700 MHz chip, I believe it was 1/2, but with the 750 MHz version, it went to 2/5 because they had trouble getting L2 chips that would run fast enough. All classic Athlons are in Slot A form.

The Duron has 64 KB L2 cache running at full core speed. I believe all Durons are Socket A.

I think the Duron 800 would be preferable, unless you are doing something very specific where you are working on a chunk of data bigger than 64 KB. You can lower the multiplier on the Duron to 6, put it on a DDR motherboard with PC2100 DDR RAM with a 133 MHz bus speed, and still have the chip running at the specified speed. That should be ahead of just about anything you can do with a classic Athlon on a Slot A board, which is limited to SDRAM and a 100 MHz bus. Some Slot A boards will let you run the SDRAM at 133 and the processor at 100 Mhz bus, but the DDR route should still be faster.