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Hunter_Killers

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Oct 18, 2003
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Recently I got a comp from a friend with a 650mhz P3 Coppermine with an ASUS P3B-F and my old one is an ASUS P3V4X and I was wondering which board would be better in general and overclocking, i've noticed the P3B-F is a bit more limited in frequency options (not sure if that changes with CPU) and is reading one of the 256mb SDRAM's it had in it as 128mb.
 
The P3B-F has the best chipset ever produced by any company. Unfortunately it was designed for 100MHz bus and didn't have the AGP dividers for higher bus speeds, so overclocking the CPU bus overclocks the AGP bus. On the other hand, a 1/4 PCI divider was available, so at least you can keep PCI speeds down.

The BX chipset can hit 150MHz bus without breaking a sweat even though it was designed for 100MHz bus. You'll need GOOD PC133, and it has to be low density, max size 256MB/module using 16 chip modules, 128MB max on 8-chip modules.

It's a better overall performer, with no known compatability issues. But due to AGP overclocking you're limitted to certain types of AGP cards known to support AGP overclocking, like the GeForce2 series and Radeon/Radeon 7000/7200/7500 series.

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That would explain why it crashes even slightly overclocked in a game, otherwise the CPU will go up to 806mhz stable with anything not demanding much from the video card (9200).

That 256mb limit will definatly be annoying later since I was gonna toss in a 512mb strip.

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Hunter_Killers on 04/24/05 02:04 PM.</EM></FONT></P>
 
It's not just a 256MB limit, it's based on the number of chips per module, with a limit of 16MB per chip.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>