The AMD 760 chipset is AMD's original DDR chipset for the Athlon and Duron. Not to be confused with the AMD 760MP, which is a SMP chipset intended for long-term production, the 760 was designed to promote the use of DDR SDRAM while third-party vendors (primarily VIA) prepared their chipsets. It was introduced in October 2000, and discontinued about one year later.

The AMD 761 northbridge supports both 200MHz and 266MHz FSB Athlons, as well as 200MHz FSB Durons. Correspondingly, it supports DDR200 and DDR266 SDRAM (also called PC1600 and PC2100). Unlike other DDR chipsets, it cannot run a 200MHz FSB with 266MHz RAM, nor 266MHz FSB with 200MHz RAM. The northbridge also supports addressing 4GB of RAM and an AGP 4X interface.

The AMD 766 southbridge (shared with the 760MP) includes all of the standard functions of a southbridge, including ATA-100 support. However, with all production 760 motherboards, the cheaper VIA 686B southbridge was used instead. This can be a hindrance to people seeking to build a VIA-free system, but it does not seem to be a detriment to stability.

Until the advent of the SiS 735 and the VIA KT266A, the AMD 760 was the fastest chipset available for the Athlon. It remains one of the most stable, and as of now (April 2002), it is still possible to find some late-model 760 motherboards in the retail channel, most notably the Gigabyte GA-7DXR+.


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This writeup is copyright 2002 D.G. Roberge and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial licence. Details can be found at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/2.0/ .

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