AMD Thunderbird/Duron Investigation & Overclocking Discussion

With our modified AZ-11 paving the way for a fairly thorough investigation of the various clock speeds of Thunderbirds and Durons, we were ready to start. 

Overclocking our Thunderbird samples shouldn't be too difficult since these CPUs are already running at a decently high core voltage; unfortunately, the same doesn’t hold true for the Duron.  On most motherboards this wouldn’t be an issue, since most motherboards allow you to manually adjust the core voltage of your CPU, but on the FIC AZ-11, including the final shipping revision of the motherboard, you’re not offered this feature.

There is a jumper on the AZ-11 that is labeled "MAGIC TUNNER" which is supposed to allow you to manually adjust the core voltage of the CPU.  Unfortunately, setting this jumper to the enabled position had no noticeable effect and did not allow us to increase the core voltage of our processors any.  Hopefully, FIC will correct this in future revisions of the motherboard or by a simple BIOS update; the latter seems like a very likely option. 

But for us, without any core voltage adjustment options, overclocking the Duron was not possible.