Asus A7S333 opinions please...

[WyWyWyWy]

Thanks Greebe. And I mean SDRAM.

How much difference between SDRAM and DDR with, say, Athlon XP 1600+ would I see in real life action (and number)?

Thanks.

[Greebe]

I jumped from SDRAM (Crucial "7E") on my old Athlon system to Samsung PC2700 DDR on this machine and can't give you an example... have never tested on of these dual SDRAM/DDR MB's.

Subjectively speaking though I'd think it would run fine speed wise.

[K6-III]

On the K7S5A moving from SDRAM to DDR will get you about 25% extra performance in memory sensitive apps like Photoshop, but about 10% everywhere else. Moving from DDR on SIS735 to DDR on SIS745 gets you an extra 10% memory bandwidth. NForce2's memory bandwidth should be particularly impressive!!!!

[Nuno]

I did have a XP1600+ with both SDRAM and currently DDR (Crucial PC2100) on the K7S5A and... there isn´t any noticeable difference in real life.

Windows will start like 1 second early, you´ll get more 500-800 bungholiomarks, 200 or 300 Mb/sec more on Sandra, word and excel will not be faster and mostly all your games will run the same because they are videocard limited except if you run them at 640x480x16, and even then you couldn´t tell the diference between 150 and 130 fps average...

Point is, if you got to have the latest and greatest on your system and you can´t live with it being 10-15% slower on some apps, you have to got DDR. If you are on a budget, have a big SDR DIMM that you feel that it isn´t quite ready to hit the bin, a K7S5A and a cheap XP is the best upgrade you can do. 512 Mb DDR isn´t that cheap yet.

[WyWyWyWy]

25%!? That's pretty impressive...
Right now I'm still stuck with a Slot 1 PIII 450 and many many 128mb modules (nobody wants them anymore, I took them all)... I can spend no more than £100 (~US$150) on upgrading.

I'm thinking about going the ECS SiS735 SDRAM route with an Athlon XP 1600+, and when I have some more money then buy some DDR2700 and clock the CPU to 1.6GHz or so. HOWEVER, That board has only 2 SDRAM slot which means it would be 384MB max for me

Okay may be I am a cheap bastard but I really cannot afford more, especially since I'm saving for Parhelia.

So... am I doing right or am I just wasting my only £100?

(By the way, have looked into PIII, but damn they are expensive! Would S370 P3 1G + slotket card be a better idea for me?)

Thanks all.

[Nuno]

You´re doing the best thing. With a K7S5A and a XP1600+ you´ll have a cheap upgrade (within your $150 budget) and you´ll have a system that´s at least twice as fast than your PIII even with PC100, with the possibility of another major upgrade whenever you want (DDR and the board will support the upcoming XP2600+ or more if they don´t change the Athlon´s 266Mhz FSB).

Insisting on the PIII would be an expensive and dead upgrade path (Intel already stoped doing the PIII).