Does this type of motherboard exist? (1 Viewer)

[Max Leung]

Frankly, the amount of RAM, the CPU speed, and the hard drive transfer rates are far more important in having an efficient system as opposed to whether the memory is 133 MHz or 266 MHz or whatever speed they run at now.

Actually, it heavily depends on the processor and the chipset used too! An Athlon Thunderbird 1.5 GHz is no match for an Athlon XP 1800+ (@ 1.53GHz), for example. The XP line is more efficient at handling memory transfers (and has a good L1/L2 cache too!).
I did a quick comparison earlier this year between the Asus A7V133 (KT133A chipset, non-DDR SDRAM support) and the Asus A7N266-C (nForce chipset with DDR support), both outfitted with an Athlon XP 1800+ CPU. The FSB on both machines were at 133Mhz. The nForce machine was at least 30% faster in all multimedia benchmarks. The nForce machine also felt "quicker", probably because it had a much more efficient memory bus (USB, audio, video, and IDE were not PCI-based in anyway...no PCI bottlenecks at all!).
At any rate, see if you can get a hold of a KT133A-based motherboard, like the Asus A7V133. Very reliable board, and should be rather cheap if you can find one! But, you can't lose with a DDR board, simply because the chipsets are so much faster in all areas right now, and are much more capable of taking advantage of the DDR rates than the old DDR chipsets like the VIA KT266 and the old and aging AMD760.

 

[John_Berger]

Quote:

I figured that this statement was obvious, which is why I never mentioned it. The bus speeds aren't going to make a difference if the processor is going to crunch numbrs at the same rate.
Regardless, not worrying about being forced to DDR at this point will at least give me the flexibility to go to DDR when the finances allow without preventing me from taking advantage now of a processor that's 50% faster than the current one. Since this will involve MPEG-2 crunching, the CPU is going to be very important.
Actually, I just found out that the recent BIOS upgrade that I implemented to my current motherboard makes the motherboard handle an Athlon XP 2100+. I'm not telling the wife that, though. I need an excuse to "trickle down" this system to replace my one 800 MHz system.

 

[Max Leung]

Mpeg2 encoding? Ouch! Heh, that Tom's Hardware article shows that MPEG4 encoding is 25% faster on a DDR equipped machine. Of course, if DDR RAM is 50% more costly, well, forget it.
But, for now, wanna try overclocking? You can probably get a whole 5% or more performance boost by upping the FSB! Athlon XP 1800's are dirt cheap now (about $60 US I hope). You could probably get it up to 1900+ speeds easily!

 

[John_Berger]

But, for now, wanna try overclocking?

I'm not big on the overclocking scene. Pushing my processor go beyond what it's designed for, not to mention the potential for system instability, is not my idea of a swell time.