upgrading mainboard

[Teknoman]

i curently have the asus a7a im not haveing any problems at all but should i go buy a 760 chipset or kt266 chipset? and if i do will i see any performance increase?
i was thinking about buying Msi KT266,Msi K7master or the asus a7m or even if someone can make a better recomendation
oh and my current pc specs are
1.2ghz 266fsb
asus a7a
256megs 2100 crucial
leadtek geforce 2 ultra 64
soundblaster live
40gig IBM ata100
3dmark2001 1572

 

[Boondock_Saint]

If you are using DDR, go Asus A7M266. Best preformance with DDR out there, and great stability. A little limited on the options (no RAID), but if you want to do RAID correctly anyways you would end up buying a Promise card.

 

[stable]

Given your situation of stability, I would stay stick with what you have for now. While you will see better performance on 760 based motherboards, some are better (and more stable) than others.

My basic reasoning behind recommending that you DON'T change is split 50/50 between loving the 760 chipset, but loving the 762 even more.

If performance is what you are after, I would say wait for the prices of the dual processor boards to come down this fall. The mindset being that the new systems will all have 4-DIMM slots as well as support for all version of DDR RAM including Unbuffered, Buffered, ECC, Registered and Registered-ECC. Quite frankly, we are not impressed with the 2% increase over PC133 that the KT266 is generally giving. Our opinion is that the drivers are just not mature enough to offer any kind of REAL, measurable performance increase.

Finally, in reference to the new 762 chipsets, the benefits of the new AMD CPU's (with the extra pin) will be revealed once more models are out the prices come down (presently the MP CPU's are pretty darn expensive). Our tests show much better system resource numbers and the Linux performance is incredible. The 4-DIMMs also mean alot in that you will be able to add more memory at a cheaper price.

If price/performance is what you are looking at, here's where you would stand.

1) Existing - $0.00 0% Increase
2) Upgrade to A7M266 - $150.00 5% Increase
3) Upgrade to K7Master - $160.00 9% Increase
4) Upgrade to DUAL CPU 762 Based - $250.00 + New CPUs 15+% Increase
(Note: While Tbirds will work in some of the 762's, MPs are recommended for stability and improved performance)



Stable Technologies
'The way IT should be!'

 

[Teknoman]

thanks i have decided to stick with my asus a7a and just add another 256meg dimm and if i do upgrade im gonna go with the k7master thanks for your help

 

[Crashman]

I actually recommend the A7A266 ABOVE the A7M266, simply because it has no compatability issues, which VIA chipset components have, nor the data integrity issues of the 686B in particular. You would NOT see a noticeable performance difference with the A7M266.

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