As to the overclocking ability of the AMD, he mentioned that AMD CPUs are shipped pre-tested for optimized use. That means the CPU is tested to run at the most stable speed. He also mentioned that several factors play a key role in the overclocking ability of any CPU:

1. Cooling - you can not overclock any CPU with factory/default cooling fans. In order to overclock a CPU, you need added CPU cooling. Our test system was using the default-cooling fan over the CPU; the extra fans we did have were only installed to move air through the case.

2. Voltage - we did not increase the voltage of my test CPU. Overclocking often requires extra voltage in order to push the additional energy through the CPU - like turbo charging an engine to generate more horsepower - but in turn producing more heat because you are burning more fuel. It of course brings us back to point 1 - cooling.

3. The ability to overclock any processor varies from CPU to CPU. For example, not all CeleronA 300s are overclockable to the same speed - some may overclock easily to 400MHz, others to a mere 366MHz. It may be that the test AMD CPU could be from a slower batch.

AMD and Its Immediate Future?

There may be some light at the end of the tunnel for AMD. A month ago, twelve game publishers including such biggies as Eidos and GT Interctive announced 3Dnow! optimized titles for release this year (CNN, "Game developers rally behind the AMD", Feb 17,1999).

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That's good news for gamers! In spite of all this dreary news about AMD CPU's, AMD will probably surge ahead of Intel again, at least in gamers' hearts, with the release of their K7 later this year.

The K7 will introduce a 200MHz-bus frequency - and three superscalar pipelined floating point processing---the Intel PentiumIII has only 1, and runs at a feeble 100MHz. Ah, how quickly our attitudes change: a "feeble" 100Mhz, ha! Even the K6/3 is showing signs of finally putting the Pentium II to flight.

I now understand the true nature of the CPU market. I am hopeful that my tests, which started out with me scratching my head after overclocking my own CPU, has shed some light on the underlying complexity of CPU's. After tracking various hardware sites or trying to follow the craze of overclocking, there is one important underlying element in all this madness - let the CPU fit your budget and your gaming style.

For information on overclocking an Intel Celeron click HERE