Processor/mobo advice please..

[Guest]

I want to buy the fastest Athlon processor available, with a suitable motherboard. I read lots of things about DDR, 200MHz FSB, 133MHZ memory, 760chipset etc etc. Could you please enlighten me as to which configuration would be best ?

Thanks.

PS If you're just going to tell me what's in your mate's machine 'cos it runs Quake really fast, please don't bother. Real techheads only reply please.

 

[LTJLover]

there are new motherboards available now that utilize DDR RAM. The ones that are currently available are questionable in my opinion however. The Gigabyte board is probably the most popular using the AMD 760 chipset, but I don't tend to trust Gigabyte boards in general. The IWILL boards are out using the ALI chipset, which has been shown to have marginal performance gains over regular SDRAM boards. Asus has recently released their A7M266 board using the AMD 760 chipset. This board is super hard to find though. Asus has always made good boards, so this is my choice right now. If you could find it, I'd say go for it. The fastest AMD CPU out right now is the 1.2GHz Athlon @100(200) FSB. the 133 FSB Athlons should be out soon however, and rumor has it that the current 100 FSB ones will run at 133. Best of luck and I wish I had your money .

Jon
"Water-Cooled CPU Runner"

 

[Guest]

Aha ! So the 266FSB processors and boards are in fact 133FSB except that they transfer a bit on both the upturn and downturn of the clock cycle ?

Meaning that if I buy a DDR processor and board (and memory ?) it will more or less automatically do its thing (given some BIOS setting) ?

I don't have that much money, but I am willing to splurge it on a top system every 3 years or so....

Cheers

Blewyn

PS I'm quite partial to Earth Vol 1 myself.

 

[LTJLover]

Athlon/Duron boards do the 200 FSB setting automatically. the bios settigns and such will be displayed as 100MHz or such, but the data bus between the CPU and board is double pumped. I want to upgrade my K6-3 to a DDR solution, but right now the price/availability isn't there. For instance, if I can find that Asus DDR board, it costs around $200 itself. Then the DDR ram is another $200+ for 256megs. That just doesn't seem worth it right now for me. My trusty K6-3 400 still gets the job done. I hope that the supply of those things will increase in the next month or so. Good luck.

Jon
"Water-Cooled CPU Runner"