mainboard upgrade confusion!!!

[Novdid]

I have an urgent need of a new HD. I have 2 40 giggers. If you have a decent connection to the net then it's a must-have, at least for me.

Good connection+Direct connect=Download heaven.

[Kurt]

Originally posted by 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.

Look...the guy's obviously on a budget. 512>MB is better than 256MB, but it's not the point. If he puts a slow HDD the thing will be slow all round. Besides, the difference between 512MB and 256MB is much lower than between 128MB and 256MB and is also much lower than that between ans SIS board and an nForce2 board and/or a slow and fast HDD.

If *I* had to go AMD I'd use: 1024MB RAM DDR333 (not too much as to have to decrease memory timings and/or cause instability, but enough for dual channel ops) with Athlon XP2600+/333 (fastest available right now) on an Asus nForce2 SPP with a Terratec 7.1 Soundcard and Labtec THX speakers. I'd also put a RAID 0 U320 or FC array with a bunch of Cheetas 15K SCSI and a Radeon 9700pro driving a 23" Sony 16/9 TFT screen with a Sony DVD+/-RW for backup and watching movies on occasion -note that I'm using a only single CPU because it's only a desktop PC...

I *could* do better with for ex. better audio, etc, but like I said (or didn't), I'm on a budget...

[Wombat]

Besides, the difference between 512MB and 256MB is much lower than between 128MB and 256MB and is also much lower than that between ans SIS board and an nForce2 board and/or a slow and fast HDD.

And I say the exact opposite. If the budget makes him choose, I say go for the RAM.

[Kurt]

hehe...I just wrote that the difference in speed between 256MB and 512MB was lower than that between a slow and fast HDD...so go for the HDD

you got some benchmarks you want me to run to try it out?

[cjolley]

I already have a 40gig 7200rpm ata100 drive for my system.
I don't think a strip set will realy help the things I do very much.

I don't realy have a budget either, I'm just cheap
chuck

[cjolley]

Originally posted by Kurt
...between ans SIS board and an nForce2 board...

An nForce2 board is that much faster than an SIS-745 board?

That I would be very interested to hear about.
Thanks for all the feedback so far.
chuck

[Novdid]

If you go with the faster XP's, the difference will be maybe 0-20% depending on what you do.

[cjolley]

20% would be a huge difference.
Are you sure?
chuck

[Kurt]

Originally posted by cjolley
An nForce2 board is that much faster than an SIS-745 board?

That I would be very interested to hear about.
Thanks for all the feedback so far.
chuck

The SiS 745 is about on par with the VIA KT266 chipset. The KT400 is about 5% faster than the KT266. nForce2 is 10-15% faster than the KT400.

That makes the nForce2 about 15-20% faster than the SiS.

But since you're on a budget my recommendation is SiS 745 (ECS boards are really cheap) with 256MB RAM (512 if you can afford and stick to faster "sticks", preferably CL2) and a Western Digital WD400JB HDD (40GB 7200rpm 8MB cache, fastest in its category) to support either an Athlon 1800 or 2000 (the 1800 is really cheap for the kind of performance it offers). You can also install a Duron 1200 or 1300 which should be about half the price of the Athlon and will be a huge boost from your previous config anyway.

Also, don't forget you need a good power supply (see firingsquad.com) -a good one should set you back about 50$ US.

[cjolley]

Originally posted by Kurt
...That makes the nForce2 about 15-20% faster than the SiS....

This is facinating.

Say nForce2 -vs- SiS745
Both systems:
PC2700 DDR Ram at 333mz effective
7200rpm UDMA/100 HD
Athlon 1800+
Same Vid card (pick one)

Faster at what?

As far as I know, all BX boards are within 1% of each other speed wize.
I assumed that stability and features were what mattered with motherboards.

chuck

[DirtFarmer]

Originally posted by Kurt

That makes the nForce2 about 15-20% faster than the SiS.

So if your system boots in 100 seconds on a SIS745, it will boot boot in just 80-85 seconds on the Nforce2, and just think about how quickly it will shut down

Careful you don't hamper it with a hard drive with just 2MB cache cause that reak havoc on your systems responsiveness.

What you need to do is find 5 PC components that are rated 10% faster than the competition (at what I'm not sure ) so that you system is 50% faster.

Now I'm probably way off base here, but I had 8 beer last night, and probably 25% more tonight.

I have heard some people compare the SIS 745 chipset to the Intel BX for stablilty/reliablity... I still remember when SIS meant cheap crappy budget junk, now it's just cheap/budget, how things change.

[cjolley]

Originally posted by DirtFarmer
So if your system boots in 100 seconds....

If it took my system 100 seconds to boot, I'd throw it in the river.
chuck

[Novdid]

If you go with the 1800+ the difference will more likely be closer to 10% than 20%. It's the faster XP's (2400+ and up) that benefit the most from the superior mem controller.

[DGhost]

wow... so many things i could respond to.... where to start where to start..

if you care about performance and run Win2k or XP you will get a better level of performance out of 512MB of PC133 memory than you will 256MB of PC2700 on an nForce...

about the comments on HD cache... keep in mind it took the 8MB WD drives to come to the level of performance the IBM's offered with """only""" 2mb of cache.

just because the chipset handles memory timings faster doesn't mean that everything is going to magically go faster...

OS booting is pretty much entirely hard drive/processor dependant. the nForce2 is not going to load faster than the same system with a SiS chipset. you are going to see this performance difference when running things that stress the whole system (games, for instance) but not many other times. in most desktop work you will never notice the performance difference.

and the same thing goes for processors... unless you are stressing the processor, you will not notice the performance difference..

and, if you have only 256mb of ram in your system, it doesn't matter which chipset you run. you pop open any recent game and its gonna be fairly choppy as it has to swap out to the hard drive. even if the hard drive is "slower" it will still run things faster with 512mb of ram than it will with 256.

If you wanna compromise, 384MB of ram is a good amount. that gives it enough headroom that most games (at least the older ones) run fine, but the next generation games might have issues. its wiser just to get the 512.

[cjolley]

Originally posted by DGhost
postcount++;

Heh.

Here: http://www.geocities.com/SiliconVall.../2433/die.html
Merry Christmas

Chuck

(I'm still thinking)