[ale] looking to upgrade

[Vernard Martin]

On Sat, 2002-10-12 at 19:18, Geoffrey wrote:
> I'm looking at purchasing a new mb, and I'm focused on the asus a7v8x. 
> Looks promising and get's pretty decent reviews.  Anyone have any 
> experiences with this board.  Down side is that although it supports the 
> new PC3200-DDR400, I've read various concerns from no difference in 
> performance between that and the DDR333 as well as one that indicated 
> that you couldn't use but one stick of DDR400 memory on this board.

Correct on both accounts. DDR400 memory doesn't give you that much
performance boost over DDR333. At least not at the current price/cost
ratio. Also, yes, you are pretty much stuck to one stick of ram. the
minute you put in a second stick, the motherboard can't make the correct
timings to access both sticks so they downgrade to DDR 333 or lower
access anyway. SAme thing happens witih DDR 333 memoryh as well on a lot
of motherboards so its not an unusual thing at the high end memory
speeds. In my opinion, its not worth the money for anything except a
very high end number-crunching station such as rendering computer
graphics or computational science.

> Regardless, it's a hell of a jump from my current celeron 400, since my 
> 800 died and I had to drop back to the 400.

Heh. Damned near ANYTHING will be a helluva jump. Sincee you were
surviving on an 800, you might want to look at the midrange stuff
instead of the absolutely top end. AMD XP 2000+ cpus cost $99 at GinStar
and you can get a motherboard that will support both PC-133 and DDR
memory (although not simultaneously) for about $70.

> One other question.  This thing comes with an 8x agp, but my current vid 
> card is 4x.  Will the 4x work?  I'm not really looking at upgrading the 
> vid card just yet.  I was hoping that the agp would work like memory and 
> hard drives, in that you could put 'slower' stuff in there and it would 
> still work.

yes, your current video card will work. However, the key thing to
remember about AGP is that unless you are doing high end gaming, odds
are that your motherboard/video combination isn't stressing the AGP bus
anyway. I seem to recall reading various reviews on
http://www.tomshardware.com, http://www.sharkyextreme.com and
http://www.anandtech.com that indicate that only if you are running very
high resolutions (i.e. > 1280x1024) at 24bpp then you aren't using
enough bandwidth to stress the AGP 4X bus. Check those websites for the
exact nubmers as my memory is a bit sketchy on the exact resolutoins and
such. 

Expandability is very nice but unless you already use those types of
things, its just wasted flexibility. I'

hope this helps

V
-- 
   Vernard Martin (vernard at cc.gatech.edu)
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~vernard/ 
   Rules to live by: 1) Don't sweat the small stuff. 2) Its all small
stuff.

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