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Asus A7M266 and PC100 RAM?

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Anonymous
Motherboard Authority

I'm starting to feel that little "upgrade bug" again. Somehow, no matter how hard I resist, I end up spending some cash to bring my PC back up to date. So... I would like to buy a motherboard for the long term, and a chip to last me until the new Athlon core brings clock speeds up above 1.5GHz.

I'm Looking seriously at the Asus A7M266 board, for it's support of the faster Athlon chips and DDR RAM in the future. Asus's documentation says that this board will support the Duron.

My question is this: If I drop a Duron (say 800-900MHz) into this board, does it still require the DDR RAM, even though the Duron won't really take advantage of it? None of the docs for this motherboard mention PC100 RAM anywhere. I'm really hoping to be able to squeeze a little more life out of my PC100 RAM, and not spend the extra almost $200 in this round of upgrades for a 256MB stick of PC-2100 RAM.

If anyone knows anything... Please share!
Thanks,
Matt

More about : asus a7m266 pc100 ram

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Anonymous
Motherboard Authority

To keep it simple. No.

DDR RAM has 184 pins and is not slot compatible with the old SDRAM standard of 168 pins. You can't even fit them in the same slot. This is partially for good reason as they run at different voltages (2.5V instead of 3.3V).

The AMD760 based boards are DDR only. Now both the VIA and ALI sets have slots for both types of memory (though they probably can't both be used at the same time, again because of voltage differences). The reports I've read about the Ali boards suggest some stability problems with SDRAM (see Lostcircuits.com review of the A7A266). I would wait for the VIA DDR boards if you want to use your old SDRAM.

A scientist will never show any kindness for a theory which he did not start himself. – Mark Twain

Also I heard that the Ali chipset ran like a dog.

Get a decent PC133 board (KT7A or A7V133) or a DDR board.

If you are talking Duron bucks, stay at the PC133 level now and wait for the DDR/Athlon C prices to be down to PC133/Duron prices (9 months? - well DDR is getting there already)

Oh yeah - I don't think most of the DDR boards have easy oc'ing options yet. May be best to wait for a little more maturity unless you like running the edge...

-* This Space For Rent *-
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Anonymous
Motherboard Authority

Yes, there is only 1 board that you could do that, the A7A266 but like he said Magik's Memory performance is crap. I just thought I'd mention something, you cannot on the A7M266 put a 200MHz CPU (Duron and Athlon-B) and use PC2100 DDR, because that would require running the FSB and Memory clock asnycoursly which means the memory would run at 133MHz and the FSB would run at 100MHz, and the AMD 760 chipset can't do that so it's either PC1600 and Duron/Athlon-B or PC2100 and Athlon-C. Hope this helps
Anonymous
Motherboard Authority

I thank all of you for your input so far.

I did a little checking yesterday, and it seems that prices for DDR RAM have already dropped to about half of what I expected to see. Upgrading my RAM when I buy a new board and chip isn't a huge problem, I just hoped to spread out the cost of the upgrade a bit.

I know that when PC100 first came out, most boards were still running the memory at 66MHz, and that PC100 RAM was perfectly happy to down-clock itself to the 66MHz speed. Is this not the case with DDR RAM? I was under the assumption that PC2100 RAM would run at the PC1600 speed with no trouble. Is there a clock or some sort of logic built into the RAM itself that won't allow it to run at a slower rate?

Thanks again,
Matt
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