Am I alone in thinking that if you have at least a KT266A or better theres no need to upgrade soon? Till next AMD chip?

[BlueEyedBeezlebub]

Thats what I figure, I'm sure to benchmark nuts the performance different in 150fps in a game compared to 130 is something huge but I dont think so myself.

When i upgrade I want to go from games run like crap, to games run like a dream.

In my mind, my personal cutoff for a system that needs to be upgraded today would be a AMD system built around a KT266 and below.

If I remember correctly there was quite a large performance increase from the KT266 to the KT266A/SIS 735. And I've seen the Nforce2 show the most promise but still dont consider the price and work of upgrading worth it until SATA and AMDs next processor are out and used.

But if I had a KT266A/KT333/KT400/SIS734/745 I wouldnt bother myself.

This is mostly opinions, but I believe the FPS difference from pre-KT266A chipsets to the kt266a itself was quite dramatic, more so than a KT266A compared to a nforce2.

My two cents and wondering if anyone in the know agrees or disagrees, those have been my general sentiments since the KT266A release.

 

[UsandThem]

Most people don't upgrade their motherboard with every new chip that is released, but there are some who need the extra 5%-20% performance increase for Microsoft Office because they like leaving on the animated paper clip guy

 

[ChampionAtTufshop]

i still have a kt133 (thats right, not kt133a) and im gonna wait for hammer/athlon 64 to upgrade unless this mchine gets too slow (right now its decent)

 

[Texun]

It starts the old "Upgrade Cascade." One thing leads to another.

I upgraded, if you want to call it that, from a 266a to a 333 and feel no difference at all. In fact, I wish I had my money back. I also hear the 400's are not the pinnacle of performance they are hyped up to be. Sure, those chipsets would run better with hardware that can take advantage of faster memory and processors, but unless you go full tilt on the hardware I doubt that you would see it. Just my .02 worth. Actually, I will be going back to the 266A later this week, swapping out my Abit KX7-333 with an ASUS A7V266. I built one for a friend of mine and overall it is more stable and responsive than my old 266A. I never had a stability problem with the 266A but I can't say that with the 333.

This of course does not take in to consideration any overclocking, but it looks like you're not doing that in which case there would be little gained under normal use unless you go full tilt boogie with the hardware.

 

[yodayoda]

dude, i've got a KT266a board and it is running great. i'm waiting for Hammer too.

 

[Elcs]

Originally posted by: yodayoda
dude, i've got a KT266a board and it is running great.

Im waiting to win the National Lottery then the Hammer

 

[BlueEyedBeezlebub]

since my format, clean install of xp, hyperion drivers, latest nvidia drivers the system is rock solid.. 20+ hours uptime right now. I'm not shutting it down until it does it for me.

my new theory on drivers is dont touch anythign unless something gives a big performance increase becasue every time i start getting anal about driver updates my system gets very unstable.

a reliable system, which i now have isnt worth upgrading unless your going to gain a large performance increase. which is of course up to the individual (and his/her money to decide) at what point it is worth it.

But yeah, I will probably wait for hammer now. Even then if this system plays all the latest games (with a GF4/R300) I'm not upgrading.

But seeing the performance difference for everythign under a KT266A and seeing the IMHO marginal increases even the newest chipsets provide dont do it for me. I want to see night and day improvements like my Pentium 133, which I used until I built a AMD Athlon 700Mhz (thunderbird core) system (KT133). I had stability problems so I went to a Kt133A, still had stability problems went to a SIS735, still had stability problems (due to the board revision having a defect, not the chipset but nonetheless), went back to my KT133A then up to my current KT266A.. finally got it to work the way I want it and i'm staying here.

I had Quake 3 public demo running on my P133 with a Voodoo1 at 640x480x16bit! At 25fps and below but it was stable and I was broke.

So I skipped the entire P2/P3/Athlon slot time period!! talk about devotion hehe.

 

[REMF]

I'd like to wait for hammer, but even when it does become available in Q2/Q3 2003, it will be low volume and high price till Q3/Q4 at least.

Given that i have a KG7 Lite and a T-bird 1200/266, an upgrade to an XP2100+ and nForce2 now followed by an XP3000+ next year seems to make sense.
I want the 2100+ to put back into the old KG7 for a second system when i get the XP3000+ next year.

Given that Seagate SATA drives are now listed on www.dabs.co.uk getting the Asus or Abit nForce2 drive with the SATA RAID controller chip seems a good idea.

 

[TheCorm]

I upgraded from a KT133 to a KT333 in May, I won't be upgrading again until next summer.

Corm

 

[Mustanggt]

If your waiting for hammer you might as well wait another year for the next thing after that. and so on and so on. My Nforce2 rocks much faster than my 266A that I upgraded from.

 

[Vette73]

Well best thing to do is have at least 256mg ram and upgrade your CPU to a Athlon XP and that should be more than enough for you to hold out.

You can get a Athlon XP 1700+ RETAIL at newegg.com for $63 shipped.

So update your Bios and then update the CPU to XP and then wait for Hammer. You have about 6 months before it is REALLY out and the price has come down from new levels. So a CPU upgrade will make the wait so much easier.

Also don't forget to get the newwest drivesr and the newwest 4in1's.

 

[Oakenfold]

But keeping old hardware is BORING.
I need something new to play with every now and then.
Oh, just read NON computer enthusiast.
Well that kinda answers that in itself, unless you are a hardcore gamer or into DV there's no reason to run anything above 1Gz IMO.

 

[CraigRT]

Originally posted by: yodayoda
dude, i've got a KT266a board and it is running great. i'm waiting for Hammer too.

Same here.. got a KT133A board running great too.
but then again, I also have an 845pe board too.

the KT266A is awesome. I'd still be using it if my board would take a TBred CPU.

 

[rogue1979]

KX133, KT133, KT133A, AMD761, KT266A, SiS 735, SiS 745 and back to AMD 761. I have tried them all but the KT400 and Nforce 2. Benchmarks tell you the KT266A beats the AMD 761, but in real world computing, I don't see it. The AMD 761 is a classic just like the old BX chipset for Intel. Everything works the first time with no complications, and it still "feels" fast. I will "upgrade" when something else works as good, and frankly Via just doesn't have it, maybe Nforce 2 will?

 

[bgeh]

Originally posted by: yodayoda
dude, i've got a KT266a board and it is running great. i'm waiting for Hammer too.

same here

 

[Quaz]

Hey, just be glad you don't have the KT266 and all the problems that went along with it. I still have my KT133A with PC133 RAM, although now the memory bottleneck is catching up with me and my GeForce4 Ti4400 gave me stability problems before. I fixed that, but now I have tearing is some games and random explorer.exe restarts. Just flakey things but the system runs great. All in all the decision to upgrade must come from what you wanna do with the machine. If it fits your needs, do nothing. If you wanna play Doom 3 and UT 2003 without a hitch, go for it. Overall, from your perspective, I wouldn't start looking to upgrade for another 6-12 months from now. You just don't know whats right around the corner.

 

[Quaz]

I forgot to mention that I am intending to upgrade in the next couple of months to perhaps the nForce2 or the KT400A. I have decided against waiting for the Hammer 64-bit CPU due to the uncertainy of the initial product. Its like buying the first model year of a new car line, you just don't know what will break on it and will need to be fixed in the next revision. Then again, that's just from my perspective and my preference.

 

[BlueEyedBeezlebub]

a friend of mine that has a retail radeon 8500 on a SIS745 (PC2100 ram of course) wanted to benchmark against my geforce3 (both are stock clocked) on Quake 3 on my KT266A (PC2100), at this point in time i was using the latest nvidia drivers and he had the latest catalysts (which in this revision was supposed to put the 8500 on top of the geforce3).. and mine won by about 10fps.

I know there could be other factors I was overlooking but I attributed the win to the motherboard chipset.

I agree with most of you, my KT266A is a very fast chipset.. I just remember the KT266 and below chipsets benchmarking like 30fps less then the KT266A.

I just went back to Anands review of the KT266A, it had a synthetic memory improvement of 50% over the KT266, 21% over the SIS735.
Q3A 640x480 a 20fps faster than the SIS735 (its nearest competitor).

I havent seen that big of an improvement until now with the nforce2, which even that isnt quite as dramatic at about a 15fps lead over the KTseries in Q3A. If you throw ddr333/333fsb in the newest kt400 and nforce 2, then you see a 25fps improvement.

So was the KT266A as good as place to any to hold off on for a while? Yes. Is the nforce2 a great chipset and probably the only one after KT266A to be significant? yes. Is it in my opinion to late in the Athlon XPs life cycle to matter? Yes.

But I'm certainly going to be getting a dual ddr controller for my hammer!

 

[chizow]

Originally posted by: Yield

Originally posted by: yodayoda
dude, i've got a KT266a board and it is running great. i'm waiting for Hammer too.

Same here.. got a KT133A board running great too.
but then again, I also have an 845pe board too.

the KT266A is awesome. I'd still be using it if my board would take a TBred CPU.

Which KT266A? I'm running the venerable 8KHA+ with a Tbred, albeit a lower model (1700+ @ 1801mhz) rev. A, or were you talking about the Rev. B higher clocked ones?

Chiz

 

[rogue1979]

Boy, I have to add something here. Using the same cpu speed and video card, the difference between KT266A, SiS 745, SiS 735, AMD 761 and others is not gonna be 30fps. Those benchmarks are baloney. Maybe at 640 x 480 with everything turned off, but that is not real world gaming, nobody plays at those settings, so it's pointless to compare like that. Stick a Radeon 9700 Pro in there and turn on some real settings and the spread in speed between chipsets is not gonna be more than 10fps. I had them all, using a GF2 @240/470, Radeon 8500LE @ 300/315, GF3 Ti 200 @250/530 and several Radeon 9000's 285/240.

I know how to set up a system. My Sandra Memory Benchmarks are 2200/2000 on a Abit KG7 AMD 761 chipset. With my tweaked Geforce3 Ti200 my average in Unreal Tournament is 170fps@1280 x 960 x 32 with anisotropic at 8X. Although I usually turn FSAA on 2X and still average 80fps. I'm not bragging, just trying to show that the faster chipsets, memory speeds and whatnot are highly overated for gaming performance. If you worried about gaming framerates spend your money on a faster video card! If you splurge on a Radeon 9700 any of these chipsets will not give any real bottleneck to gaming performance provided you feed the Radeon with a fast enough cpu.

Someone doing giant cad progams, intensive video editing or other real work on their computers can benefit from a faster chipset/memory bandwidth.
But for the rest of us (me included) is is silly to try and squeeze out extra gaming performance spending lots of money on chipset-motherboard/memory upgrades when we are not even running a Radeon 9700.

I can't say it enough, if your real worried about gaming framerates spend the money on a faster video card. If you have the fastest video card on the planet, worry about a faster cpu first, then a chipset/memory upgrade last.

 

[piasabird]

Unless you just have to have a processor with a bus speed faster than 266 (133 X 2), you can not get much of a performance gain by upgrading. Right now the high-end Athlon XP Processors are a little high. I was thinking about buying another A7V266-E (AA) without the raid. This is a great KT266A motherboard for $75.00. I was thinking about getting one for my daughter since she is still running a PII 350 System with a Voodoo 3 card. The only problem is what video card to get. Hopefully prices will drop before I get my Income tax back. The PC2100 memory is still a pretty good deal.

There may be some Via chipsets with Dual DDR coming out if you just have to upgrade.

 

[BlueEyedBeezlebub]

what rogue said is true but my point was, the radeon 8500 retail is faster than a stock original geforce 3.. our drivers were set to the same settings same res.. ect. when a gf3 beats a radeon, and the only difference is the motherboard (he actually had a 1800+ while I have a 1700+), and the geforce3 wins.. theres no beating around the bush on why.

but yes, the main proponent to fast fps is the video card, i think everyone knows this and is why i pointed out a gf3 beat a radeon 8500 (a superior card).

 

[glenn1]

The better question is if a non-performance user needed to replace his board (say his trusty KT133 board bit the dust), what would be your recommendation then? Would you advise him to save money by sticking to a KT266A board, or would you suggest to spend a bit more money and get the latest greatest (like an NForce2). For someone who isn't just upgrading, is the difference in performance and features between an older and newer board compelling enough to spend the extra money for the newer board?

 

[Mustanggt]

I could of kept my 8KHA+ but I wanted to get A trbred and overclock it I dont know if that new bios for 8KHA+ will unlock the Tbred? thats why I upgraded. I have a $69 Cpu running at 2Ghz in the epox 8DRA+, you cant overclock it that high in the 8KHA+ without running PCI bus to high.

 

[rogue1979]

BlueEyedBeezlebub, I have read all the reviews out there about Radeon 8500 vs. Geforce3 and again I have to disagree by personal experience. According to them the 8500 beats a Geforce3, but I did not come to the same conclusion on several different systems. Radeon 8500LE @300/315 vs Geforce3 Ti200 @250/530 sounded like a pretty fair match up, but it wasn't. In 3DMark2001SE the Radeon was slightly ahead, but in actually gaming the Radeon was always behind. 10-20fps in most of my games, and with FSAA on 2X it dropped to as much as half the speed of the Geforce3. I guess it depends on how you set up your gaming, most of my testing was at 1280 x 960 x 32 at 2X FSAA anisotropic on or 1600 x 1200 x 32 anisotropic on no FSAA. I know this goes against the benchmarks out there, but this is what I came up with, and due to the Radeon 8500's excellent 3DMark score it must have been set up properly. It's tough to gauge the performance of two different pieces of hardware unless all other parts are exactly identical, and even then sometimes software can be a big factor.