Dazed and Confused bout Athlon Processors

[plbass]

lo. I'm planning to upgrade to a supa dupa fast athlon processa and I'm very confused about the athlon processors. I was planning to buy the 1.4gig athlon processor i saw at a comp shop, but now I've heard about this athlon xp thang and i'm just wondering if i should wait for that to come out or should i stick with the plan and get the 1.4(i'm in no particular rush, btw). i was also planning to buy that Iwill KK266Plus "main"board that used SDRAM to accomodate that, but am puzzled as will future athlons will actually support this board. need help. reply fast appreciated. thx.

 

[AEboy128]

I say wait for the XP to come out and wait for benchmarks for it. It will be out on the 9th i think it is well worth waiting for.

Edit: Never mind they are out now...

My system: <A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?rigid=8946" target="_new">http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?rigid=8946</A><P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by AEboy128 on 10/08/01 09:26 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[lhgpoobaa]

personally for a new athlon i would go with DDR ram... now that there is a choice of high performing DDR motherboards around.

and the choice of XP or not is up to you.
the 1.4 performs very well, and the XP's will be considerably more expensive for some time.


Religious wars are 2 groups of people fighting over who has the best imaginary friend.

 

[plbass]

I'm also a bit confused about the DDR (i.e. what's the difference between regular, ecc, and the registered ones?), besides, PC133 is still the cheaper one to go with for the moment. one of the biggest factors that i'm still concerned with is will the Via KT133A support the new athlon xp processors that will be coming out. and what about the nforce thing, wasn't it supposed to be out this month?

 

[lhgpoobaa]

allright.

three species of DDR ram.
bog standard, registered & ECC.

bog standard is good enough for most people.
u can get very high quality stuff too.

however... depending on if tis sdram & mobo type you are usually limited to a max of 3 sticks of unregistered sdram or 2 of ddr.
try to use more and you will probably run into trouble.

registered ram is higer quality... with a few other things included, so u can utilise more than 2 or 3 ram slots.

ECC ram, you should forget about... clock for clock its a bit slower than normal or unregistered. its use lies in that it has inbuilt error correction... so therefore is extreemly reliable. used mostly for server operations where speed is not as important as data integrity.

the good thing about the revised thundabird (ie athlon XP) is that it doesnt require a new socket... it could be used on many old ddr/sdr mobos.
HOWEVER, for the athlon XP to be fully supported and stable most new motherboards have updates to handle the thermal monitoring probe, different voltages, differetn multipliers etcetcetc.

i know for one that the KK266 mobo does NOT have XP support, however the newer KK266-plus does.

nforce is a new chipset. it would be suicide if it didnt have athlon XP support.


Religious wars are 2 groups of people fighting over who has the best imaginary friend.