Hi Alex , ... first of all ... the suffix IL is for wich Country ? ... I am not able to guess ... :o) ... Second ... going in details ... 1) I understand going with Athlon I'll will have to chose certain motherboard (not all Pentium board will work with it, right ?) You should start to go to http://www.asus.co.tw and study the different MB offered .
In facts , not only they are different for Intel processors and for AMD proc. , but ALSO different for different form-factory in the same processor belonging to the same vendor ... so be careful ... the MB is the basement for the performances of your system ... a clugg or a bottle neck in the MB and expensive parts are simply USELESS or not exploited at the max they can give . 2) Also, it seem to use DDR memory type not being compatible with regular SDRAMs, right ? (so the motherboard supporting the Athlon are intended for DDR memory interfacing, am I wrong ?) DDR is extremely fast but also expensive .... so ordinarily it's used for video cards memory. As far as I know ... the simms of RAM are called SDRAM and other names ... and are quite cheap ... I am planning to buy for the system I am assemblying right now ... I am planning to use 2 x 512 ''chocolate sticks'' for the cost of 106 € (Euro) each ... or 85$ (more or less) . What you have to check is to use 133MHz memory ... same price of 100MHz memory but faster and newer .... so available for larger chunks. Today my system has (ASUS K7V motherboard with AThlon 800MHz SLOT A form fatory) 256 MB of 133MHz RAM 2 x 128 The number of slots is also fixing the max upgradeability of the board ... so the A7V266 has 3 slots for memory boards and can reach the 3GB of RAM being available in chuncks of 1GB MAX + having the microcode able to manage that . 3) BTW, what about cooling ? I've heard AMD should be treated in special way in regard of it since being heated significantly. Many suggest adding additional fan streaming onto the CPU. Is that correct ? Really ? .. I have no need of extra fans (for CPU seen that ATHLON SLOT A is a small book comprehensive of L2 CACHE and fans etc. etc. ... also ... Pentium IV has got owful problems of heating seen the frequency of clock used and the extreme push it has been used to counter the performances problems it has .... so be careful ... if you will ever go P IV (with the today available technology) you must be sure of having a good power and good set of fans .... but remember you are going to use a 64 bit architecture with a 32bit operating system (either W98 either NT are 32bit ... and the available Linux is ALSO 32bit !) .... The AMD XP (and so for the older Athlon) have a different architecture i.e. 32bit and so better performing with O.S. at 32bit .... My wife's system is on AMD Duron (800MHz) ... so big and silent fan sealed and clamped on the CPU ... no probs so far ... I am not sure of carrying the absolute true ... but I am pretty sure of being experienced since 22 years ago in this world ... being so far employed in a MAJOR (BLUE ;o) .... ) computer company and professionally dealing with XL and XXL Unix systems . Sincerely. Ezio www.lucenti.com e-photography site ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body