A question for Athlon Uers ??

[Pooh]

I have been thinking about an athlon based system but there are several things that are concerning me. One of the main ones is that all the models of Athlon based PC's I've seen so far when you go Control panel\System\Device Manager\Hard Disk Drives and then double click on the Hard drive and then choose settings, the dma box is greyed out.

Has anyone elso seen this and if it is a common factor what impact does it have on the drive performance.

One of my friends had an Athlon650 with a FIC SD11 mobo. connected up to that was a maxtor 36Gb drive. He had a huge problem getting any real performance from the drive.
It would only benchmark at around 2 - 3mb/s.

I have read a few reports that say the SD11 mobo is a bit of a dog anyway and i'm not sure of the other Athlon based PC's had the SD11.

Pooh

[This message has been edited by Pooh (edited 01 February 2000).]

[kidspot]

I'm running a 500mhz (oc'd at 600) athlon on an MSI 6167 board. It has been a very stable board. You are right about the SD11 - it has been coming up in reviews with a great deal of conflict trouble. The only thing I've had trouble on my 6167 with was a "no-name" pci card reader (without a manual to set the jumpers by I should add) Other than that I've kept all four IDE channels full, scanner, 2 printers, and one serial port in use. I'd recommend this Mobo easily. It would be nice to wait and pick up a 4x AGP version when they come out though.

As far as DMA - they were available, and turning them off sent my HD from 12m/sec to 3m/sec. Very noticable. You will not have DMA available if you are using an ultra 66 drive with the 40pin instead of the 80 IDE ribbon.

[JayZ]

I'm running an Athlon 700 o/c to 800 on an Asus K7M right now without any problems at all. I would stay far away from the SD11 as possible. I've heard and experienced many problems with that board. I would get either an Asus K7M or the MSI 6167. Both are very excellent boards and very stable for overclocking. There was a good review of these boards and about overclocking the athlons over at www.anandtech.com a little while ago.

As far as DMA box being greyed out. You should get the VIA IDE Busmastering drivers. This should allow you to enable/disable DMA on the devices you choose.

Hope that helps.