As in PC133 SDRAM as used by this board.
http://www.ocworkbench.com/hardware/...3/a7v133p1.htm
The chip operates on a DDR principle internally (133/266), that's why it's so fast. The same for Duron 1800 which is faster by 600MHz than that Thunderbird-C in question. Aside from the reduced L2 cache, the Duron 1800MHz runs the core at a faster speed than the Athlon XP 2100+ (Palomino), which is 1733MHz. You also get
SSE support; apps that use such instructions show significant increases in speed not to mention the Intel-beating FPU performance.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...spx?i=1927&p=1
Athlon is good but there are price, availability and compatibility issues to iron out.
However if the user wants to also run 3D games then the graphics card is
critical.
A slow hard drive will also hinder performance.