You may think that four listed problems are already enough, but there's one more problem, if you want to call it that way.

Yesterday I learned from several readers that their place of purchase decided to replace an MTH-motherboard with motherboards that are equipped with VIA's Apollo Pro 133A chipset and SDRAM. There is certainly nothing wrong with Apollo Pro133A, it's actually a good product, but we should not forget two things. Intel is not advising to replace their board with one that's equipped with a competitor's chipset and motherboards with Apollo Pro 133A chipset plus PC133 SDRAM are significantly cheaper than i820 plus RDRAM. Thus a dealer could give his customer the cheaper VIA solution and get i820 plus RDRAM or the money for it reimbursed from Intel. In this case, the dealer would obviously cheat upon his customer.

I doubt that the majority of dealers who should offer a replacement board with VIA-chip are trying to cheat. Most of them will simply not have any i820-motherboard and RDRAM available. Still I would recommend that you as an affected customer should make sure that you get what you deserve. Following Intel's guidelines, that means you are entitled to a i820-motherboard wo/ MTH and RDRAM to replace your SDRAM.

Don't Let Them Give You The Wrong RDRAM!

One last thing I'd like to note as well. You might remember that there are three different flavors of RDRAM. PC800 is the fastest and by far most expensive, PC700 is medium and PC600 RDRAM is the cheapest and slowest. Please don't forget to have a look at my article "Showdown at 133 MHz FSB - Part2, The Real McCoy ". In there you will find the performance difference between i820 w/MTH and PC100 SDRAM vs. i820 w/RDRAM of PC800, PC700 and PC600 specification. Don't let them give you PC600 RDRAM, because your system will then be even slower than your original configuration with PC100 SDRAM. Here's an excerpt from the article: "Once i820 is using PC700, PC600 or SDRAM with the MTH it is the slowest chipset in the comparison! "

Be aware of that too!

Follow-up by reading the article 'Tom's Blurb: MTH - The Story Isn't Over Yet ... '.