mainboard upgrade confusion!!!

[PeTe]

PCI/AGP lock means that even if you change your FSB your PCI/AGP bus stays in some set value.

Normally if you change from 133 FSB to lets say 160FSB your PCI bus rises from 33Mhz to 40Mhz and this can be harmful for your Hard drives, not to mention it might cause some instability. With normal systems motherboards have a number of fixed dividers that they use to calculate the PCI bus speed, example 133 FSB 1/4 is used, 166 FSB 1/5. But current motherboards dont have dividers past 1/5, so if you are hoping to get 200Mhz FSB [ like me ] then its allways a risk that your hard drives or other cards wont run on such high PCI/AGP bus speed.

With PCI/AGP lock you can set that your PCI stays @ 33MHz no matter what your FSB is set.

It helps overclocking and improves stability [ = Great feature ].

Hopefully that explained that feature, others can add if i forgot something.

Pe-Te

[Kurt]

I've been looking around for nForce2 boards and chose the Asus one (SPP). Good layout, good speed, not too expensive (even for Asus).

SIS are OK but SLOOOOOW. The VIA chipsets are much faster but their drivers are still not very stable.

Rigth now nForce2 is the fastest all round by a good margin (all things being relative).

I'd wait end of january, mid-february though as prices will be lower (_nobody_ lowers prices for new products before Christmas) and new BIOSes released, unless you want to update now now now...

[Greebe]

SIS are OK but SLOOOOOW.

You've been playing WAY too much 3Dfarq2k1

[The PIT]

If you want a laugth pop over to viaarena and see what they say about sis. I think they've been blinded by the Via fud.

[Gurm]

Err...

Ok, the issue with the MSI 745 Ultra is that they started monkeying with the RAM timings, and had a couple of "rushed" BIOS releases.

I think you'll be fine with the latest.

There aren't any drivers, per se, for SiS (except for AGP, and even that may not net you any speed gains).

I still recommend the MSI 745. It's SUPER-cheap, and SUPER-stable.

- Gurm

[cjolley]

Originally posted by Gurm
...except for AGP, and even that may not net you any speed gains...

Heh,
I gave my wife my Max for her birthday a year ago. (she actualy uses Dual-Head)
I'm using a PCI Voodoo3 2000
chuck

PS I'll probably get a Radeon 9000Pro along with the MB/Proc/Mem stuff.

[Gurm]

The SiS AGP driver does nada for me speed-wise. *shrug*

- Gurm

[Kurt]

Originally posted by Greebe
You've been playing WAY too much 3Dfarq2k1

I invented it!

SIS is FINE but it's not the fastest. Used to be VIA with their KT400. Now it's NV with their nForce2. Tomorrow? Who gives...?

What's the point of buying a 2GHz+ chip if you castrate it with a slow mobo? Get a faster mobo and a slower chip (and a faster HDD) - the sys will be snappier and won't cost an arm 'n a leg

[cjolley]

IYYYEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!

I can't decide.

nForce2 Motherboards are twice the cost of SIS-745 Motherboards.

That's like a free upgrade from 256 to 512 megs of PC2700 ram.*

chuck

*Actualy that pretty much sews it up for the MSI 6561.
**Unless the 746 chip MB shows up in the next few weeks.
***Interesting Avatar GURM

[Kurt]

Originally posted by cjolley
IYYYEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!

I can't decide.

nForce2 Motherboards are twice the cost of SIS-745 Motherboards.

That's like a free upgrade from 256 to 512 megs of PC2700 ram.*

chuck

*Actualy that pretty much sews it up for the MSI 6561.
**Unless the 746 chip MB shows up in the next few weeks.
***Interesting Avatar GURM

RAM won't make your PC faster (it helps not slowing it down...slight difference) so, if you take a slow mobo you'll end up with a slow PC.

Anyway, an excellent price/performance combo is: AMD XP1800+ (2000+) and whichever Sis 745 mobo you can find. Don't bother putting 512MB RAM DDR if your budget is limited. Get yourself a fast hard drive instead like the Western Digital WD400JB. It's "only" 40GB but it's 7200rpm and has 8MB cache. It's vey fast for its category and should be only slightly more than 256MB PC2700. Don't buy generic RAM either, go for brand name RAM with CL2 timings they'll perform much faster than whichever ddr at CL2.5 or CL3 (go apacer, corsair, crucial, micron, etc.).

This should lend you a very nice system at a low price point.

Remember: HDD is _very_ important as the processor is NOT the bottleneck.

[Wombat]

Gotta disagree there. 512MB will show a big difference over 256MB with W2K or XP. The extra RAM will avoid HD thrashing - and that doesn't matter how fast your HD is, it's still significantly slower than main memory.

[Novdid]

Gotta agree with Wombat on this one, 512MB is a must if you want a snappy system.

And 80Gb HDD's offer a lot more value than 40GB ones, just calculate how much it will cost you per GB.

[K6-III]

...assuming you of course plan to fill those GB's.....

[cjolley]

Well, on the HDD front, I run my system (w2k) off of a Maxtor 40 gig and store files and an Oracle database on 2 (mirrired pair) 60 gig IBMs.
One of which is being RMAed even as we speak AGAIN*

In fact, I thought about getting 2 Maxtor or WD 60 giggers and creating a mirrored 120gig striped array, but I don't realy have any use for that much space.
chuck

*That's three out of four that have cratered.

[The PIT]

Originally posted by K6-III
...assuming you of course plan to fill those GB's.....

Unlikely unless you're doing video editing or installing loads of different os's. The hard drives are more likely to fail that get full.

Yep more ram does help as does the faster ram if into overclocking becuase you can pudsh the barriers a little more.