A few months back, the AMD Athlon was sizzling hot. It was THE choice of performance enthusiasts and was keeping up with the Intel P4 quite well. But every product has a life-cycle and there’s no denying that the current Athlon will be taken over by the upcoming Hammer shortly. Until that happens, AMD needs something to keep competing with the P4 which is riding quite high at the moment.

A few months back, the Athlon made the jump to the 0.13 micron dye with the Thoroughbred core and introduced it at a speed grade of 2200+. Just over a month back, new speed grades of 2400+ and 2600+ were announced by AMD, based on the same Thoroughbred core. Although these newer speed grades were upping the speed, the Athlon’s 266MHz Bus was being the restricting factor, especially with the popularity of DDR333 memory modules.

Just a week back, AMD announced two new CPUs- the XP 2700+ and the XP2800+ and what separated them from the earlier CPUs is that AMD raised the Athlon’s FSB from 266MHz to 333MHz. Today, we have the XP 2700+ CPU for review- lets find out if the switch to 333MHz has made much of an impact and if AMD can once again reclaim the speed crown.