Although we have yet to receive a production-grade board that utilizes the 760 chipset, AMD has lent us one of their own reference design boards, which they have named, “Corona.” The design of AMD's board is similar to what we would expect many of the motherboard manufacturers to be releasing when the time comes later this year.

Four memory slots were included to allow for the full 4GB memory limit to be reached – never mind the nightmares we had imagining the cost of populating the slots with 4GB of PC2100 DDR memory. Two of the slots housed 128MB DIMMs of PC2100 memory from Micron. Rated at CAS 2.5, these modules have slightly more latency than the CAS2 memory modules we traditionally use, but for the time being this is the cost of dramatically increased bandwidth.

Like most motherboards on the market, our reference design sported a couple of DIP switches for bus-frequency manipulation. This is definitely a good sign for those who wish to push their processors to the limit, however we have our doubts about the overclockability of a 266MHz front side bus coupled with DDR memory. Of course, overclockers would likely enjoy a Duron 700 (with the 7x multiplier) running at 933MHz on this new platform.

There are a couple of things we should tell you before you take a gander at our numbers. First off, we took out 128MB of RAM out of the review system so that all of our benchmarking platforms would be comparably equipped. Additionally, while we usually include Windows 2000 numbers, we were unable to enable DMA mode on the AMD test system, giving us pathetically poor scores in the synthetic content creation benchmarks. Until we can solve this issue, we won't put any weight behind the Windows 2000 scores and have not included them. Now, let's roll up those sleeves and dig into some numbers.