Gillish schrijft: "Dan van Dan's Data heeft een 700MHz Slot A Thunderbird weten te bemachtigen die zonder problemen op z'n Abit KA7 draaide. Hij was zelfs redelijk te overclocken; tot 840MHz (120MHz FSB) met een 0.05 hoger voltage. Het bleek dat de "pull/drive-strength" opties van het KA7 moederbord totaal geen effect hadden op hoe ver de CPU wilde gaan, de Thunderbird werkte gewoon ":
A 115MHz Front Side Bus speed, which the KA7-100 had seemed perfectly happy with when using an older Athlon, would turn this 700 into a 805MHz CPU.
And so it did. No voltage boosting, no other tweaks required. A nice clean Windows boot, and a stable computer. Compared with an old-model 800MHz Athlon, the Thunderbird again level-pegged for synthetic benchmarks, and scored a narrow but repeatable win for real-world performance.
At 120MHz FSB, for 840MHz core speed, Windows started but wasn't stable. Bumping up the CPU voltage from the default 1.7V to 1.75 cured the problem.
Setting the KA7's Pull-Up and Drive Strengths to 2 and 4 respectively didn't seem to have much effect on anything. The CPU ran OK at 840MHz (120MHz FSB) whether or not the logic settings had been changed, and 875MHz (125MHz FSB) was unattainable with any logic or voltage setting. Windows would start at 125MHz, but would perform a cranio-rectal inversion after a few minutes. 840MHz seemed perfectly stable, though; at this speed, the Thunderbird is easily the equal of a genuine 850MHz Athlon, costing more than twice as much.