On 21 Apr 2002, Kenneth E. Lussier wrote:
> point me in the right directions. I am looking to buy a new motherboard
> because the one that I have is fairly limited in it's upgrade path. With
> a new motherboard purchase, I am going to be making the jump into DDR
> RAM (right now I still use PC100 SDRAM). One of the problems is that
> there seem to be many different levels of DDR (ranging from PC1600 to
> PC3200). I'd like to read up on what exactly these specifications mean,
> if the are compatible, interchangeable, etc.
My experiences are that DDRSDR (at this stage of the game) provides very
little enhanced performance over Standard SDR. I've used both and the
benchmark numbers as well as overall user experience is near invisible, if
noticeable at all. The gamer sites notice the same thing and only very
recently have been able to point out any change in performance, and that
was insignificant. There's a lot of good review sites around, and I'm
sure we all have our favorites.. here's mine:
http://www.hardocp.com
http://www.sharkyextreme.com
If you're upgrading your motherboard for other (various) reasons, I'm
quite happy with my AMD Athlon boxes. They're cheap, they're good. I
will tell you that you need to pay attention to the heatsink. I recently
burned up an older 1.33G of mine while I was swapping it into a different
box and (oh, how I loathe to say it) installed the heatsink backwards
(there's a little lip to match the socket's lip - wrong side... doh). On
the bright side, I replaced it with a AMD XP 1700+ (the + is the
"effective" intel speed - what it compares with. It runs at 1470 Mhz.. I
think?) for $118 - with the 3 year warrantee and the heatsink/fan.
I recently also bought an MSI K7N420 Pro (has onboard Nvidia GeForce 2 MX
style video onboard audio and onboard ethernet) for $130. Essentially,
everything I needed for $250, since I already had the rest of the stuff.
Hard to beat that... and while it's not the best and fastest video card or
probably the best sound card (though it does support dolby digital..?!) it
works for me.. it's just a cheap second box for multiple uses.
Ben
--
Reshape one's foot to try to fit into a new shoe.
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