-For the value buyer

AMD Duron 800MHz
Estimated Price: $80 USD

    Just because we chose it as a value choice doesn't mean it's slow. This wasn't the case a couple of months back, when a value CPU such as the K6-2 with a weak FPU meant slow and unreasonable gaming performance. The Duron 800 is plenty fast for gaming, and with such a low price tag, getting a powerful processor this holidays doesn't mean you'll have to go bankrupt. In games, the Duron gives you around 90% performance of it's bigger counterpart, the Thunderbird, while it's price is only 70% of it's equally clocked bigger brother. And just like the Athlon Thunderbird, it has a 200MHz front-side bus with it's "double data rate" bus with allows the information to be transferred on both cycles of the bus. In summary, it's fast, reliable, and cheap; that's all value buyers, myself included, demand and AMD has delivered with the Duron.

Specifications:

Clock	800 MHz
Bus	200 MHz
Interface	Socket A
L1 Cache	128 kB
L2 Cache	64 kB (core clock speed)
Die Size	0.18µ
Transistors	25 million

-For the mid-range user

AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1GHz
Estimated Price: $180 USD

    If we were writing this buyer's guide 12 months ago, a $180 CPU would belong in the "value buyers" choice, and commonly, a CPU with such price tag back then was unsuitable for high end gaming. Of course, lots have changed since then. Now AMD is our speed king, and they are making the rules. It's hard for us to consider an Intel Pentium III 1GHz which costs around $450 over the Thunderbird 900MHz which costs about half as much and yields equal if not better performance in games.  No doubt that AMD is the winner in this round of performance/price war and a clear choice for the hard core gamers.

Note: There is also the Slot A version of Athlon Thunderbird. They have 512 kB L2 cache, however the L2 cache runs around half of the speed of the core, as opposed to the full clock speed of the L2 cache on the Socket A version, which results in lower performance when compared to equally clocked Pentium IIIs. For this reason, it's strongly recommended that you stick with the Socket A.

Clock	1000 MHz
Bus	200 MHz
Interface	Socket A
L1 Cache	128 kB
L2 Cache	256 kB (core clock speed)
Die Size	0.18µ
Transistors	37 million

-For the high-end user

AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1.2GHz
Estimated Price: $290 USD

    It's AMD once more in our line-up of CPUs of choice. Actually it is more or less the only option for absolute highest end user, as the PIII 1.13GHz isn't around, and Pentium4 is lacking application support for it's features, which leaves Athlon Thunderbird 1.2 GHz unchallenged and puts AMD at the speed throne. In case you were wondering, the estimated price is not a typo, it really does cost only around $290. Compared that to the $1000 which was the cost of the 1GHz processors a couple of months back and you'll realize how competition benefits the consumer the most.

Clock	1200 MHz
Bus	200 MHz
Interface	Socket A
L1 Cache	128 kB
L2 Cache	256 kB (core clock speed)
Die Size	0.18µ
Transistors	37 million