PIII450 to TBird 1400 - G400 vanilla (any performance difference?)

[bibble]

I am debating upgrading to a TBird 1400 (266 fsb not xp - budget does not stretch) from a pentium III 450. Does a G400 16mb scale much? At what point does increase in processor power become moot for the G400? thanx to anyone in advance. (first post so I hope am in the right place)

[Greebe]

Upto the 800-900mHz point the G400 scales quite nicely.

Welcome tot he forums

[bibble]

thanx.

Just out of curiosity do you know of any instabilities in relation to g400 and gigabyte ga-tdxr motherboard based on AMD 761 chipset? I fancied the raid and suspend to ram. I was waiting for the kt266a boards to come out but they may be sometime I gather - (does anyone if they are due soon or not)?

I have never had a non intel system and have always had a matrox card (once with a voodoo2), and also wondered if there were incompatibilities with AMD/VIA (as they make the southbridge)/Matrox.

[Wombat]

AMD tends to make top-notch chipsets. I loved my 750 board, and maybe I'll get a 760 next.

I don't know that particular MB. But if it has a Via 686B south bridge, don't buy it. That chip is awful. And Via's drivers are awful.

No known AMD/Matrox incompatibilities. Once everything is running nicely, you may want to consider overclocking your G400. With a processor that fast, the G400 is the bottleneck, and the overclock will help it.

[bibble]

Wombat,

As far as I can tell most current AMD boards have the via 686B southbridge as it is cheaper than the AMD version. Due to there being no VIA KT266A boards available at present (fancied it due to the reviews at Toms hardware and Anandtech etc. about a 5-10% boost just from the motherboard).

However to keep it to topic is there a general problem with the via drivers and any graphics cards not just matrox. Could newer drivers have matured and reduced instabilities you mentioned? What sort of problems come with Via drivers?

On the 4in1 drivers are they necessary for the AMD 761 chipset and 686B combination then?

[Wombat]

The 686B is a flawed chip. It corrupts data. This happens more with Live! sound cards in place, but that's not a guarantee.

Also, the 686B is not very good at bus mastering. My 750 motherboard could do on-the-fly CD copying, and my HDs were faster, and my CPU usage low. Not true at all with the 686B.

I'd choose SiS over using a 686B board. Cheap, fast, and not Via.

And you will need some of the 4-in-1 drivers, like the USB and IDE patches. You will need AMD drivers for AGP (and AMD can write better drivers from the beginning than Via can after years of practice).

[xortam]

I noticed a performance improvement in Q3A even going from a P!!!/850 to a P!!!/1 GHz processor. The game seemed to be a bit smoother and more responsive with the Gigger. This is on a P2B-S running with a 100 MHz FSB.

P.S. This is with a G400 Max ... stock timings.

[Indiana]

Bibble, the EPoX 8KHA+ with the KT266A is out and already sold and it's most probably the most stable and fastest AMD chipset out there.

But then I'd prefer a KT266 non-A mainboard over the SiS, looking at the real performance of the ECS SIS board (most times slower than the KT266, in contrary to what the previews showed) and the various threads with problems of SIS users...

[bibble]

was just looking at that board today but cannot find one to buy as yet. The UK Epox site does not give much away for mainline distributers - does anyone know a uk site that is stocking this board (It should be about £100ish)

Also the southbridge chip is different to the 686B - does this chip suffer from the same problems Wombat mentioned?

As there is currently no other video card which supplies the support for dualhead under win2k I am sticking with my g400 for awhile yet but did have a problem running the multiplayer test of wolfenstein with mass corruption onscreen (one wall attaching itself to another on the other side of the screen - on dZues' site it mentions exchanging the opengl dll for an older version - any idea which version as 5.51 and 5.52 dont work... any ideas?

[Indiana]

Look at this thread for a UK reseller of the EPoX 8KHA+, costing £86.

The southbridge of the KT266 up to now has only one reported problem, the non-working USB at high FSBs and even this is better with the A revision. No SBLive or AGP or PCI or DMA problems reported up to now.

[Wombat]

The things I've been hearing about SiS 735 boards has all been positive. I'd like to see some negative stuff.
There seem to be some decent MB companies putting out boards. Dr. Mordid says his friend is getting great performance with them.

[Indiana]

Well, for the real performance of the existing SIS boards you can take a look at any of those KT266A reviews - quite disppointin, only a bit better than the MAGIK.
And there are quite a lot of threads about problems with the ECS board and higher clocked TBirds out there, on Planet3DNow!, AMDMB and even on this board.

[bibble]

so tonite is the night..

My XP1600+ arrived today (was meant tobe a 1400tbird but they ran out)... to go with 512mb ram, epox 8kha+ (thank you Indiana) and a purloined aopen 300w powersupply. So the big question win2000 or xp? (g400 vanilla 16mb by the way)

I know I was asking about hardware probs with the g400 now the problems of XP... are there many/any?