Folks...AAARGGH! I'm really CONFUSED with all these CHIPSETS!

[DarkFudge2000]

Could some kind young intelligent person ( or alien from another planet close to the solar system 6152331) kindly and BRIEFLY list and just explain to me all the different chipsets there are out there now to consider when buying either a Athlon or P4 chip and motherboard?

And basically I currently have a ECS K7S5A motherboard with an Athlon 1.4 processor and a new Gainward GeForce 4200 video card and was perhaps considering upgrading to one of the speed demons but am really not sure if it's even worth it at this point and time since I most likely will not even double my speeds in games and all my image editing programs.

Basically what do all these newer chipsets bring better to the table compared to my ESC board which I think uses the SIS 7 chipset?

If someone can give me a quick 5-10 minute rundown on each I would really appreciate it since I havent really been following the upgrade curcuit closely since this last ESC /Athlon 1.4 upgrade.

Or even if you could point me to a link that would help, I'd greatly appreciate it .....thanks!!


Would you spend the extra cash now to upgrade to a newer system and if so....which combination would you build??





thanks again all!!

 

[mechBgon]

You might find some useful Pentium4 info in this thread. That info is still pretty up-to-date except that i845GL seems to be appearing on the market (no AGP slot, no 533MHz support, steer clear of i845GL).

Judging by the reviews, you could reasonably expect today's fastest AMD chipsets to give you approximately 10% more speed per MHz than SiS735 in the more noticable cases. I haven't got an AMD-chipset thread to recycle, but the major players now are SiS745, nForce, KT266A and KT333, at least for the enthusiast market. nForce2 is supposed to be announced on July 15 and some flavors will reportedly have onboard FireWire and USB 2.0.

In general, something I think more P4 and AthlonXP boards will be bringing to the table, compared to the K7S5A, is integrated features like USB 2.0, FireWire, deluxe-ish sound, maybe BlueTooth, LAN (ok, K7S5A has that option), and the ubiquitous IDE RAID. People don't pooh-pooh the integrated peripherals as a sign of a cheesy board quite the way they used to.

 

[DarkFudge2000]

great post...very informative!!....Can anyone else add some more??


thanks again Mech......taking the time to write was greatly appreciated!

 

[Peter]

Well if you want to upgrade on the Athlon route, then why not try the fast CPU you want on your existing board, and see whether you think that's good enough - before spending $100 for three more percent you probably wouldn't even notice.

Computer upgrade algorithm: Identify bottleneck. Replace. Repeat until out of money.

regards, Peter

 

[Jayczar]

Originally posted by: Peter

Computer upgrade algorithm: Identify bottleneck. Replace. Repeat until out of money.

regards, Peter