If its all the same I will probably just go with the DFI and save myself the $10
Seems like a good idea, the features between the two appear to be very similar.
While the Limit should be about the same it will mean having to put lesss strain and easier over clocking to get to that same limit. The time of just pumping up the bus from 66MHz to 100 and going 300 to 450 is over now You have to worry about all kinds of stuff Like bus locks Memory speed HT speed base bus speed voltages, the less of this or the lower you can keep these when over clocking the better.
Not really...any nforce4 based mainboard will be bus-locked by default, and setting the FSB higher on an Athlon64 does not "strain" the rest of the system. Yes, you have to lower the HTT multiplier as you go higher, but that's about it, and really, either chip should hit at least 2.4 GHz, and at 10x that's still 240 MHz on the FSB, which will necessitate dropping the HTT multiplier to 4 already, and at 9x it's 267 MHz on the FSB to hit 2.4 GHz, which is still doable on the same 4x multiplier.
That value RAM he's thinking about buying will not run synchronously at either of those speeds, which makes the memory divider issue moot, and it was already moot anyways, because running a memory divider on an Athlon64 does not incur extra penalties like it does on Intel chips.
All things being equal, the 9x chip will overclock exactly the same as the 10x, and multipliers and dividers can be easily used (and will have to be used, in either case) to keep other things in their necessary ranges, and should not necessitate any voltage or other tweaks that the 10x wouldn't as well. For example, if I drop my multiplier to 6x, I can boot and use my system just fine at the max FSB setting of 400 MHz, as long as I drop my HTT multiplier to 2.5x, and run my RAM at DDR400, the higher FSB speed does not place any undue strain on my system.
