The Athlon (l) pictured above had never been used, while the Duron (r) had a few thousand hours of use. Note the heat discoloration by comparison.  Cooling is a critical element in construction of Athlon and Duron based processors. The supplied heat sink and fan should be used and a case cooling fan should be positioned near the CPU location (most ATX cases have a fan mount on the rear above the CPU).

Full tower Athlon Thunderbird 1GHz workstation

• Tyan S2390 Trinity KT ATX motherboard - Athlon/Duron Socket A up to 1GHz, VIA KT-133 chipset, 200MHz frontside bus, up to 1.5Gb of PC-100/133 SDRAM supported
• 512Mb of Kingston PC-133 SDRAM
• Two Western Digital 40Gb 7200 ATA/100 IDE hard drives (configured at ATA/66 due to board controller)
• ATI Raedon GPU 64Mb DDRAM AGP 4x video card (this is a very high performance card)
• Creative Platinum Live Drive PCI sound card w/remote control (compare updated Live Drive with older version in server)
• Pioneer 115 16x/40x DVD
• TDK Velo 12x/10x/32x CD-RW (32x RIP)
• Netgear 10/100 Fast Ethernet NIC
• Samsung SyncMaster 955DF 19" flat screen .20 dot pitch monitor
• Logitech iTouch wireless keyboard and mouse
• Altec-Lansing ADA 880 5-piece Dolby Digital surround speaker system w/remote control
• Network print server for HP DeskJet 1220C wide carriage color printer
• Dual boot to Windows 2000 Professional or Windows Me
• The video, monitor, sound, and speaker combination on this machine makes it exceptional for those into gaming

Close-up of new Creative Live Drive version front panel: infrared remote control, optical I/O, and aux I/O added. TDK Velo CD-RW also shown.

Mid tower Duron 700MHz workstation

• Tyan S2390 Trinity KT ATX motherboard - Athlon/Duron Socket A up to 1GHz, VIA KT-133 chipset, 200MHz frontside bus, up to 1.5Gb of PC-100/133 SDRAM supported
• 512Mb of Kingston PC-133 SDRAM
• One Western Digital 8.4Gb 5400 ATA/66 IDE hard drive
• Voodoo3 2000 16Mb PCI video card (came from the K6-2 workstation)
• Creative SoundBlaster sound card
• Pioneer 115 16x/40x DVD
• Macronix 10/100 Fast Ethernet NIC
• Creative ModemBlaster 56kbps v.90 data/fax/voice modem
• Samsung SyncMaster 550s 15" .28 dot pitch monitor (repaced with Philips-Magnavox 109S 19" .28 dot pitch monitor)
• Antec small profile keyboard and mouse
• Altec-Lansing ADA 880 5-piece Dolby Digital surround speaker system w/remote control
• Windows Me operating system

With the exception of the speakers, this workstation was inexpensive to build, but delivers very high performance.  The Duron 700MHz CPU is very near the performance of a Pentium III 700MHz (maybe even better in this application).

Duron close-up, showing CPU and 2 128Mb PC-133 SDRAMs memory installation (replaced with 2 256Mb PC-133 SDRAMs). The Voodoo video card is in the first PCI slot (2x/4x AGP slot is open) at the bottom of the picture. Note the case cooling fan in the upper left corner of the picture, mounted below the power supply. 

Duron case interior. Card arrangement, top to bottom, video card, modem, NIC, and sound card (all 32-bit PCI slots. Additional case fans shown lower right (front of case) and upper left (rear of case). The mid-tower Enlight case uses rail mounts for drives, making installation and removal very easy.