Duron 650 + 750 MHz

The Celeron beater. A nippy little chip at the time of purchase.

I couldn't afford an Athlon at the time, but the prospect of a 200MHz FSB, which was phenomenal at the time, was too much for me to ignore. It gave me superb performance in Unreal Tournament Deathmatches - even against my Pentium III owning team mates!

In essence, the Duron is a stripped-down Socket-A Athlon Thunderbird with only 1/4 the L2-cache size, available in speed ranges from 600MHz up to 950MHz (later ones had different cores).

Introduced in late summer of 2000, I just had to have one, it offered speed that was clearly superior to the K6-2 550 I had at the time and was only little slower than Intel's and AMD's equally-clocked flagships, the P-III and Athlon.