Best motherboard for Athlon and PC133 memory???

[StayPuff]

I've been out of the motherboard loop for some time now. If I were to upgrade my current system (Asus K7M, 750@959 Slot TBird, 768 MEG PC133 RAM) by replacing the motherboard and processor, what would be the best motherboard/CPU combo to look at. Please keep in mind that I'm not all that excited about replacing 768 Megs of PC133 memory....

Or, am I totally nuts in wanting to keep my old memory? Would I be better off getting new memory anyways? Is PC133 all that slow compared to what's out there today? I realize that it is not DDR which is popular today.

Finally, what exactly does PC2100 or PC2700 mean? As soon as memory went to DDR, I lost touch with what the numbers mean.

 

[mechBgon]

PC2100 has bandwidth of 2100 megabytes per second, and PC2700 has 2700Mb/sec.

If you want to get an Athlon board that supports PC133, the popular ECS K7S5A supports up to two modules and will take any SocketA processor up to at least AthlonXP 2200+. Asus has an Ali-based board, the A7A133, with three DIMM sockets. Or there's the venerable KT133A chipset, although a quick survey shows that most manufacturers' implementations of it dont' support the AthlonXP. It looks like Microstar's K7T Turbo2 does, up to AthlonXP 1800+ edit: correction, up to 2000+! thanks Buz ), but their site is down so I can't link to it. MSI board at CompuCheap.

One other solution that supports PC133 would be a board based on the KM133 chipset, which is derived from KT133A but has an onboard video controller, plus an AGP slot, and typically is made into microATX boards which may also feature onboard LAN. A good example would be the whoops, I goofed! lemme try this again... Biostar M7VKG

As for performance, DDR is faster. Maybe you can sell the old memory to offset the cost of the new?

I wanted to add that the ECS K7S5A has two slots for regular SDRAM but also two slots for DDR. You could start with PC133 (2 sticks, anyway) and get DDR later. On my K7S5A, performance difference between SDR and DDR was up to 10%, although that wasn't with an AthlonXP, which may be able to take advantage of DDR to a greater extent.

 

[Buz2b]

The Link for the MSI K7T Turbo2 is here. Nice board. I used one for my wife's system. Supports up to XP2000+ cpu.

 

[Spartyguy]

Piggybacking on this... I've been out of the MB loop for awhile also... I'm trying to help a buddy build a system, and he wants to use his BestBuy gift certificates for everything, but all I see is crap there for MB and RAM. The only thing I saw there is the Athlon 1800+ for $139.99 (kinda high, do they pricematch?). I'll probably want to get his DDR ram from Crucial.

Any suggestions for a good Athlon MB that can handle 2100+ Athlon (eventual upgrade), DDR ram, no overclocking needed?

 

[mechBgon]

If BestBuy has any tempting deals on monitors, that might be a good thing to buy locally with his GC's because it will save him the shipping, but if you want good selection for motherboards and CPUs (at good prices) BB is probably not so hot.

Motherboards based on nForce, KT266A or KT333 chipsets are some good ones to look at and there are also SiS735 boards like the K7S5A, or SiS745 boards like the Asus A7S333. The SiS boards used to have a sharp price advantage, but now KT266A and KT333 boards start in the $70-80 area at online stores and they offer higher performance. nForce boards generally come in a little behind KT266A in speed and ahead of it in price, although some flavors (420D for instance) offer really good onboard sound, network, and GeForce2MX-level video. If you go that route, for the most part you would want to avoid using one or three sticks of memory on nForce (this is glossing over a bunch of "ifs" and "buts").

 

[Spartyguy]

Unfortunately, he's not looking at monitors.... I agree though! He's pushing on using his G.C.'s, but I'll just tell him to get the Samsung RW Drive there ($39.99 after rebate), HD, Video, and maybe the $140 case with the 400 watt power supply.

I'll probably tell him to get his MB, Processor and Ram from newegg, maybe the case too... dam# him for trying to stick with B.B.

 

[StayPuff]

Thanks for the responses -- GO GREEN!

 

[Spartyguy]

Originally posted by: StayPuff
Thanks for the responses -- GO GREEN!

Hehehe...

Go WHITE!!

Good luck on your system. I just built one cheap about 6 months ago. Lemme know if you have any questions.

 

[steimm]

I have a Athlon 1800+ XP (unlocked running at 1633MHz) on a ASUS A7A266-E (ALi Magik) with 512 MB PC133 and I'm really satisfied with the performance and the stability. I've tried DDR (borrowed from a friend) on the MOB aswell and the difference wasn't sooo huge. Caused by that I've decided to wait a while before upgrading to any other memory-support (and new memories aswell).

/steimm

 

[jaybee]

I just purchased a mobo and XP1600 to go with my crappy old PC133. Crippling my system? I don't think so; check out this article at Ace's. It looks like DDR buys a P4 2GHz <10% performance improvement. Slow memory will have less of an impact on an XP than for a P4 Willamette because the XP's pipeline is shorter (less data to fetch on cache miss). The Northwood mitigates this somewhat with a larger cache. I could probably get a 5-10% boost for my XP1600 with DDR, but I've already got the PC133.

jaybee

Edit: Here's another comparison. This one shows about 10-20% improvement (in 2 tests) with DDR on an XP2000+. Slower processors will see less of an improvement.

Edit: One more here, but they use a Duron -- less cache means it's more sensitive to memory speed -- and a KT133 instead of KT133a. There are Athlons included, but you can't make a direct comparison because they use different cpu or fsb speeds. My impression is ballpark 10% improvement, depending on the application.

Last edit (I promise): quoting from this article:
In our previous article, the VIAKT133A decision, we found interesting surprises. In game benchmarks, DDR-AMD760 systems are between 10 and 30% (!) faster than VIAKT133-SDRAM solutions. But the VIAKT133A, thanks to (1) the reduced latencies of running the Front Side Bus and memory synchronously, and (2) Memory interleaving, games run on the VIAKT133A only 1 to 13% slower than the AMD760-DDR configuration.