Question : Problem: AMD Athlon 100 settings

I've just bought a new pc with an Amd Athlon 1100 and a pc chips 810 series motherboard from a dealer at my local computer fair. (U.K.). I asked the dealer to match a system which had a Duron 1300 processor for price and 128 mb of ram. He only had an athlon 1100 with which he could match and fitted 256 mb of ram because of the lower chip rating. He said the Athlon 1100 would be faster than the Duron 1300 which I am unsure wether or not is true.

My cousin put my cd writer from my other computer in it for me and upon checking the bios noted it was set to 11 x 100 mhz fsb = 1100. Now he has an Athlon xp 2000+ in his machine which is set to 1.67 ghz. My motherboard is auto chip configure, but has a manual overide by which you can enter the processor speed. It is not clear in the manual wether you can manually set the clock multiplier. the bios screen shows items including cpu ratio cpu frequency and dram frequency, it has an ami bios. my question is this. I thought all Amd processors (indeed all non Intel chips)should be set lower than the rating on the chip. my cousins is 2000 set at 1.67, so what should my Athlon be set to? I've had it a fortnight without problems. The Amd website didn't have the information on it and my chip was covert with heatsink paste and a fan.

Can the cpu multiplier on my mainboard be set manually or not, or is it locked in to the cpu speed you select? Or would altering the multiplier automatically adjust the shown cpu speed to what the multiplier is? Also which is faster, Athlon 1100 or Duron 1300, and by a little or a lot? Could my supplier have overclocked to make it seem faster, or would there not be much speed gain?

Answer : Problem: AMD Athlon 100 settings

The newer AMD CPU's such as the XP2000+ do not reflect the actual clock speed. The AMD Tbird series, such as your 1100, does. AMD used this rating as a marketing ploy because Intel was putting out faster chips than they were.

Using the actual rating should be fine.  It's when you exceed this rating, called overclocking, that causes problems.

Also, AMD processers are locked with jumpers on the chip that you can unlock but you probably don't want to go there. You can tell if the seller tampered with the clock, because the chip will say 1100 on the label if it was original an 1100. Also, you will see cuts and bridges on the chip.

The Athlon will be faster because it has more cache in the chip, and cache means a whole lot more than a couple hundred Mhz's

Hope this hits everything.
You made a good choice.