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.
Whether Intel CPUs are too expensive, or whether AMD CPUs are too cheap - that's a matter of personal opinion. As a matter of fact, AMD aggressively dropped prices during the last months, resulting in an amazing price advantage of all Athlon CPUs. Even the top model (Athlon 1.4 GHz) costs less than $180 now. A Pentium 4 at this clock speed is slightly more expensive, while only the Pentium 4 1.7 GHz is able to perform like AMD's flagship - at double the price!
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.