I'm a newbie. I'm trying to figure out what kind of CPU I have. When
clicking at "system" on Winxp, it says "Athlon XP1700+". I know that
it's a 266 mhz fsb.
Is this a Thoroughbred or Palomino?
Could be either one. AMD actually produced a Palomino, Thoroughbred-A
and Thoroughbred-B part for the AthlonXP 1700+, all of which had a
266MT/s bus speed.
If you want to find out what version of the processor you have you
need to get a program that will check the CPUID bits of the chip.
H-Oda's WCPUID program will do the trick, you can find it here:
http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA002374/src/download.html
To tell the difference between the chips, you need to look at the
Model and Stepping entries. A Palomino will be Model 6, stepping 0
(stepping A0), 1 (stepping A2) or 2 (stepping A5).
A Thoroughbred-A chip will return Model 8, stepping 0.
A Thoroughbred-B chip will return Model 8, stepping 1.
Of course, other than power consumption there really aren't any
significant differences between these chips.