AMD / Nvidia Hyper transport or Intel ... ...

[Protouringcars]

I have one concern before jumping to a new motherboard.....south bridge to north bridge bandwidth. I don't need a ton but something moderate. Buuuut, my processor must be an Athlon XP or P4! I understand that Nvidias nforce chipset has a 400MB one way....800MB (up and down) bandwidth with it's hyper transport.... 8 bit wide bus with a 400Mhz bus speed = 400MB. Intel has a 266Mhz technology between their northern chip and southern......buuuut...is that 266 one way like the 400 with the nvidia chipset ooorrr is that the total for both the up and down streams like the 800MB (up and down) nvidia chipset. Someone tell me what they know ... any internet sources to back up your info would be greatly appreciated! Thanks much!

 

[BeeMojo]

You also have to look at total busses, usually intel chipsets gives you more busses, so there is less bandwith sharing between slots.

Some more on what you are looking to do would help, like what cards, how man, and are they 32 bit, 64 bit, or PCI-X?

 

[Rainsford]

IMHO, all those numbers are mostly marketing bullcrap unless backed up with benchmarks to indicate performance. Just read Anandtech's various articles on chipsets and processors, and don't pay any attention to the specs. This may sound stupid, but having a lot of bandwidth or processor speed means little, what matters is how it performs. Case in point, a 1.8ghz P4 has more bandwidth in the FSB and a faster clockspeed, but it will be slower (in most cases) than a 1.6ghz Athlon XP. Numbers aren't everything, benchmarks are a much better indicator of performance.

 

[GraveJoKer]

I agree with Rainsford ... Any Athlon XP proc. can beat the s**t out of an Intel processor (read in any non memory intensive process, like gaming etc.) But now that bridge would be narrowed down further with the release of DDR400...