Only the Best: 9 Athlon Motherboards With The AMD 760 Chipset

Only The Best: 9 Athlon-Motherboards Based On The AMD760 Chipset

Many companies do not need to lament the failure of RDRAM in the desktop market, since their anyway preferred marketing catchwords "Athlon" and "DDR" were strengthened by the demise of Rambus memory in the mass market. Indeed, current Pentium 4 systems with Intel's 850 chipset require RDRAM, but a change is en route. The new Northwood core will be backed by the i845, alias Brookdale, which has been announced with only simple SDRAM support, but is expected to support DDR memory soon.

With the latest price drops in the memory sector, computers with 256 or 512 MB finally affordable. Still RDRAM memory is expensive: Approximately $50 gets you 128 MB PC800 RDRAM, while you will get 256 MB PC2100 DDR or even 512 MB PC133 SDRAM for the same money! According to motherboard manufacturers, the Brookdale chipset may become the next BX, as it is expected to be very reliable and, teamed with Socket mPGA478, to remain in the market for a while. No matter which architecture you choose: DDR SDRAM is currently the memory to go with.

Patrick Schmid
Editor-in-Chief (2005-2006)

Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.