Help with Motherboard choice

[Kelmenson]

I'm trying to figure out which motherboard to get, and this whole DDR issue is confusing the issue.

I'm looking for a motherboard for an Athlon 1.2Ghz, 266 bus. I would prefer RAID. I don't plan on overclocking. My video card is a Radeon. If I did get DDR, I would probably only get the PC1600.

Opinions? Thanks...

Dan

 

[rominl]

getting pc1600 is not really a smart move, better off just get pc133 i'd say

if you don't o/c at all:
DDR SDRAM: ASUS A7M266
PC133 SDRAM: Iwill KK266/ASUS A7V133

 

[Kelmenson]

What would the typical performance difference be between PC133 vs PC1600 vs PC2100? If the PC2100 does give a significant boost, I would consider it. There doesn't seem to be a real difference in price between DDR and SDRAM motherboards, nor between PC133 and PC1600 memory. But it does look like PC2100 is recommended for the 266 bus.

Also, the Asus A7M266 doesn't have RAID. Are you recommending the Asus over the Iwill KA266-R due to the AMD760 vs Ali Magik 1? Or do you just not think RAID is worth getting?

 

[rominl]

well, from the reviews i have read, seems that for current applications pc2100 will give around 10% speedup in some apps (while some don't show much), and pc1600 holds a tangible gain above ddr, that's why i said if you get ddr, get pc2100. and yeah, specially if you get 266 athlon, get pc2100. see, if your cpu can use a larger bandwidth, it doesn't make much sense to make your memory a bottleneck right? that's how i think about it.

yeah, for the ddr board, mostly coz' the ali chipset is not that good. from the review it shows that the 760 outperforms the ali chipset by quite a margin i'd say. though so far i haven't seen a 760 board with integrated raid... hmmm