More Athlon reviews than you can shake a Pentium 4 at...

THE WEB IS AWASH with reviews of AMD's new Athlon chips. Anyone who may or may not be anyone seems to have been sent a sample of either a 2.17GHz Athlon 2700+ or a 2.25GHz Athlon XP 2800+, and an Nforce2 mobo to go with it. Some have both. And some have just the Nvidia-enabled boards. The chips were unveiled by AMD this morning, though some question whether AMD will produce sufficient quantities -- particularly of the 2800+ variety -- for you to find find them in PCs for sale before the end of the year.

So, this Wibble will, er, wibble through a bunch of the reviews posted after the 1pm (Yuke time) non-disclosure agreements ran out today, just to see what the fuss is about...

AMDZone got an Athlon XP 2800+ with the nForce 2. They compare it to a P4 2.4GHz with 1066MHz Rambus, and the Athlon XP 2200+ and 2600+, over here.

They reckon the 333MHz FSB and the nForce 2 chipset have "breathed even more life into the Athlon without the need yet for a more costly-to-manufacture Barton." The extra bandwidth has shown some excellent results in memory intensive benchmarks like Quake Arena where the P4 has had a big lead before, they add. "An excellent combination" if, indeed, you can get your hands on both of them.

Anandtech quite liked the Athlon XP2800+, but like many others, questions the marketing: "The processors won't be widely available for another couple of months, clearly not something to get excited about," they say.

And the performance gain they found "wasn't due to the increase in clock speed, but a result of the FSB and memory buses now running synchronously at a 166MHz frequency. " Anand's contribution is over here.

Extremetech likes the 2800+ too, but has a familiar gripe. "It is gratifying to see AMD pull out the stops and build a CPU that can keep up with Intel… It's a great performer. The only question left is: when can you get one?" Quibble thee hither.

Amdmb.com compares its XP 2700+ with the now-sort-of-nearly-available 2600+ to find out how the 333 MHz bus helps things along over here.

The Germans at Computerbase had a look at both the 2700 and the 2800, sticking both in an EPoX 8K3A+ and an Asus A7V333 to measure the difference. Here's an altavista translation. And Here's the original.

There's a review of Nforce 2 and KT400 tests over at c't magazine.

The funky nordics have a look at the 2800+ with NForce2 over here, in, er, Danish.

Hexus.net takes a look at NVIDIA nForce2 reference board over here. "What you are basically looking at over (the) original nForce is support for new 333Mhz bus Athlon XPs, support for DDR333/DDR400 memory at 133 and 166MHz CPU clock, the same APU with all its audio goodness and a bang up to date set of southbridge features like Firewire, and USB 2.0. DualNet is worth a mention too," they reckon.

Some benchmarks of the Nforce board tipped up on MadOnion over here.

After jumping the gun, pulling their early review and then posting it back up after the NDA hour, Aces Hardware found the nForce 2 can push the performance of the Athlon XP up to 15 per cent higher. Ensuring, they say, that the Athlon XP 2800+ "is indeed competitive with the 2.8 GHz Pentium 4". Wibble this way.

Hothardware stuck their pair of Athlons in an Asus, the A7N8X nForce mobo over here.

"Where everybody has their review up, we don't want to miss out," say the guys at Lost Circuits. Here's their take on 2800+. And they stuck an ATI RADEON 9700 Pro in Nvidia's "graphics platform". Is that allowed, we wonder?

Sudhian has a 2800+ in an NForce 2 board over here. SimHQ has the 2700+ over here. And HardOCP posts its take on the 2800+ over here.

Tom, of course, got both chips and tried them out in Asus' Nforce 2 boards, again with a ATI Radeon 9700 Pro graphics card over here. "Athlon XP 2800+ is the performance winner," they conclude. "But not available until 2003," is the familiar refrain.

Back to the Vaterland, TecChannel has its take on an Athlon XP 2800+ mit FSB 333 over here. They compare and contrast it with a Pentium 4, of course.

3DVelocity posts its verdict on the Nforce2 over here. And the deviants got hold of an XP2700+ which they review here.

And that my dear wibblers is quite enough Athlonababble for one day…

Outside AMD land, Anand got his mitts on the new dual Xeon Tyan Thunder i7500 Pro mobo and had a fiddle with it over here.

The funny old Japanese site, PCWatch has posted another one of its nice, home-made Intel roadmaps over here.

And a posting on Arstechnica alerted us to the distraction of the launch of some space shuttle contraption, that has its own little webcam thingummy on board, it seems. Nasa TV will carry the Rocketcam pix tomorrow, apparently, over here.

You can nail the Wibbler here.