I know some of this doesn't particularly tie into this section re- the motherboard, but didn't want to split up my post.
My current PC system is based around an Asus A7V333 motherboard and an Athlon XP2100 CPU, which I built about 8 months ago (when the A7V333 had just come out). I've had no problems at all with my Radeon 8500 graphics card and all it well. I have just got a new Radeon 9700 card and am therefore considering upgrading motherboard to provide an AGP 8x interface rather than the 4x present on the Asus board. However no-where can I find performance data to see what kind of an increase the 8x AGP would have. Is it worth it? I know that the performance of the 9700 will also be dependent on the CPU running, how much difference would a processor upgrade make? Assuming that I can get a reasonable improvement by the upgrade, can you suggest a motherboard to satisfy my requirements: (both a P4 and an AMD choice)
Must support Ultra ATA133, and RAID ATA133 (one of the reasons for buying the original A7V333) 6 channel audio Lan (Gigabit preferred, but 100MB/S Ok) USB2 support Firewire AGP 8x Serial ATA - This would be nice, but is not a requirement as the technology is still very new and I will have probably upgraded again before it is commonplace!
In terms of chipsets, I do not really mind, though I know there have been some known problems with certain chipsets and the 9700 cards.
Many thanks in anticipation.
Paul Baker
My current PC system is based around an Asus A7V333 motherboard and an Athlon XP2100 CPU, which I built about 8 months ago (when the A7V333 had just come out). I've had no problems at all with my Radeon 8500 graphics card and all it well. I have just got a new Radeon 9700 card and am therefore considering upgrading motherboard to provide an AGP 8x interface rather than the 4x present on the Asus board. However no-where can I find performance data to see what kind of an increase the 8x AGP would have. Is it worth it? I know that the performance of the 9700 will also be dependent on the CPU running, how much difference would a processor upgrade make? Assuming that I can get a reasonable improvement by the upgrade, can you suggest a motherboard to satisfy my requirements: (both a P4 and an AMD choice)
Must support Ultra ATA133, and RAID ATA133 (one of the reasons for buying the original A7V333) 6 channel audio Lan (Gigabit preferred, but 100MB/S Ok) USB2 support Firewire AGP 8x Serial ATA - This would be nice, but is not a requirement as the technology is still very new and I will have probably upgraded again before it is commonplace!
In terms of chipsets, I do not really mind, though I know there have been some known problems with certain chipsets and the 9700 cards.
Many thanks in anticipation.
Paul Baker
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