Need advise on 2 Q's: Mobo Chipset and memory

Kalkooksoo

Distinguished
Feb 24, 2004
2
0
18,510
First, I have a question about mobo chipset. I had a great experience with the Asus nForce 2 chipset mobo for my Athlon XP 2500+. Thus I bought a nForce 3 Chipset mobo for my new Athlon 64 3200+ processor. In particular, I went with the GIGABYTE nForce3 150 Chipset Motherboard Pro for AMD Socket 754 CPU (Model "GA-K8N PRO"). I think I am having buyers remorse since I have seen reviews that state that the K8T800 chipset mobo for the Athlon 64 is better (more stable and faster). Can anyone confirm which mobo chipset is currently better for the Athlon 64. If the K8T800 is better, I am thinking of returning my gigabyte nForce 3 board for the Asus k8T800 board.

Second question has to do with using two sticks of PC3200 ram to go with my Gigabyte nForce 3 board and my new Athlon 64 3200+ processor. I just bought matched TwinX set of Corsair PC3200 ram (2 x 512 =1024megs). The concern I have is that I have heard that the nForce 3 150 chipset for the Athlon 64 does NOT support dual channel. Furthermore, I have heard that you will not only get the benefit of dual channel but that it will cause major problems with your system. In fact, some people have stated that you can only use 1 stick of memory because of this issue. Can anyone confirm or give me more information...especially if this issue has been resolved.

Thanks!!!
 

Crashman

Polypheme
Former Staff
The best A64 chipset is the SiS 755, but that's only available on budget boards right now. The best high end board is the Soyo K8USA and uses an ALi chipset.

Midrange 755 chipset boards and high end nForce3 250 boards are on their way soon.

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endyen

Splendid
The via chipset has a faster hypertransport bus. This is overkill. .the 600mhz bus on the nforce boards is more than enough. That may not be true when pci-express comes out,but for today's boards the nforce3 is a good choice. (Mainly because it's not via) Your preference for nforce is a good thing imho.
The a64 chips do not have dual channel. They do have an ondie memory controller, which more than makes up for it. The issue with 2 sticks of ram is more for socket 940, though even there it is more a question of operator error.
With bothe socket 754 and socket 940 a burn-in at high latency is a good idea.