1) SATA2. I have seen reference to this but not quite sure what it entails. I have a couple of original SATA drives already - if I get a board with this will I see any performance improvement? Or do you have to get drives that specifically support it?
SATAII simply increases the amount of available bandwidth from 150MB/s to 300MB/s. (it does add a few new features that are pretty inconsequential...like some related to external devices) Since it is a point-to-point bus, in which bandwidth is NOT shared among devices, and given that no drive approaches 150MB/s yet, this is not needed at the moment.
2) I have 2 512MB sticks of Kingston DDR PC2700 running at 167MHz and 2-2-2-5 right now. I would like to reuse these. Any chance I can toss them into the 939 system with a 200FSB or will I have to get new RAM?
You'll want to get faster RAM. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense to spend all the big bucks and not get new RAM to go with it. That being said, you probably wouldn't notice much of a performance drop in using PC2700, so long as the motherboard supports it.
3) What's this DDR2 I see at Newegg and the such? Anand doesn't use it in his reviews of the Athlon 64 mobos - is it for Intel chipsets? I also see chips rated all the way up to PC4800 (DDR600). Are these just marketing gimmicks or are they actually that fast? Aren't they limited by the 200Mhz FSB on the mobo?
DDR2 runs at higher frequencies, but has an additional latency hit. Until DDR2 gets to around DDR800, it won't provide enough additional throughput to offset the latency hit. Right now this is an Intel-only technology. This is partly due to the different requirements the differing core technologies have. The K8 core is sensitive to memory latency but not so much to throughput, while Netburst is the opposite.
4) I currently have an AGP video card and not really any reason to upgrade it right now. However, I don't want to shell out the money for a new MOBO with only and AGP slot when I know I am going to be buying a PCI Express card in the next 6 months to a year. I saw this Biostar board at Newegg (http://www.biostar-usa.com/mbdetails.asp?model=NF4UL-A9) and it looks like it has both PCI-E and AGP slots. But the manufacturers website doesn't have any manuals or BIOS up for it. Anyone know if this thing exists?
Go PCIe if you want any upgrade path. The best boards are PCIe only.
5) Have there been any DVD drives out with a SATA interface yet? I would like to finally get rid of all those IDE cables.
Yes. Plextor has a few SATA DVDRW models available.
6) Any mobo recommendations out there? I need socket 939, SATA, Firewire, USB 2.0, onboard LAN, good sound. Either AGP or PCI-E will work, but both is a dream. --
The MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum (Non SLI unless you suddenly plan to start doing massive gaming)
seems to be getting good words.
HTH,
Greg
