I have 3 sticks of 256mb Crucial PC133 what board to use?

[1kayaker]

I hate them sitting around. Need suggestions on something to build with them. Prefereably an intergrated system for my 5 and 8 year old daughters. Help me out.

 

[Cerb]

K7S5A Pro. Couple w/ nice PSU ($32 Fortron) and 133MHz FSB Athlon XP or Duron, and you have a pretty nice desktop PC.
I don't know of any current, cheap and decent mobos w/ onboard video that take SDR SDRAM.

 

[o1die]

In pricewatch under "motherboards", select the KLE133 chipset. They have some integrated boards listed for about $50 shipped from soyo and msi.

 

[Peter]

For an intergrated system, you first need to get some grates, and then stick them inbetween ("inter") your system parts.

For an integrated system on the other hand, if you want to recycle SDR RAM sticks, you either have to go way back in time (KLE133 or SiS 730 chipsets), or look for the few remaining boards that have DDR RAM chipsets but still also have SDR DIMM slots. MSI and PC-Chips/ECS still have a couple of boards on offer.
Be aware that chipset integrated VGA paired with SDR RAM is going to stink no matter what chipset, particularly so with the VIA KLE133 chipset that's using a stoneage Trident graphics engine.

 

[Cerb]

...I think you'd be much happier just getting a K7S5A and sucking up the cost of a $25-$30 AGP card. Those VIA options not only have poor onboard graphics, that will bb starved for bandwidth even in desktop use, and are based on the VIA KT133(A?) chipset, which will be noticeably slower and have strange quirks. The KM266 would be better there, but still nothing to write home about.
The SiS 735 has quirks, but when you're dealing with the top-selling Athlon board (K7S5A rev. x), it's easier to work with them . I'd say make one K7S5A PC, and see if the RAM works in it at 100MHz (the K7S5A was tickey about RAM long before the NF2, 865 and Athlon64 came around). One of them almost certainly will. And if all three do, you can make 1-2 more systems.

 

[RickH]

Sell the RAM, get something "modern". A duron 1.6 for $40, an ASUS N force 2 for $70, $50 in memory and it's an OK system. Any board that uses PC133 is poor by todays standards. R

 

[tcsenter]

Ah yes, the old SDR + DDR topic. At least I'm useful for something!

In the AMD XP/Duron department:

ECS K7S5A Pro SIS735

MSI KM2M Combo-L VIA KM266

Biostar M7VIG PRO VIA KM266

And a couple others based on the KM266 theme. The ones listed above are still readily available if you look around (Newegg, eWiz.com, ZipZoomFly, PCParts.com, FTIComputer.com, et. al.). 266MHz FSB processors is the max on these boards. Pay attention to what you're buying, because there are later versions of the Biostar and MSI models that have removed the 168-pin SDRAM slots, leaving only DDR. e.g. The Biostar M7VIG PRO "D" has DDR slots only.


In the Intel P4/Celeron department:

ASUS P4S533-MX SIS651

ASROCK P4I45G Intel 845G

ASROCK M266A VIA P4M266A

And a couple others based on the same theme. These are available from most of the same vendors. The P4 boards above support S478 P4 and Celeron (400MHz and 533MHz FSB) up to 3.06GHz (including HT), except the Intel 845G board, which ASROCK states will support 800MHz FSB up to 3.2GHz with overclocking.

All boards listed have an AGP slot, whether or not they also have integrated VGA, so you can toss-in a cheap 32~64MB DX7 or DX8 AGP card that will out-perform any of the integrated solutions by a healthy margin. USB2.0 ports and an upgrade path to DDR. Can't go wrong.

Good luck!

 

[Bonesdad]

what Cerb said...

 

[RickH]

SELL the RAM!!! Don't spend $$ on old, slow, stuff. All the boards listed can only use 2 sticks of memory so you will only have 512MB. You can sell the 3sticks of 256Mbs for as much or more than 512MB of "modern" memory. The system will be more current than a PC 133 based sysytem. Toms Hardware had a good article on the effect of chipset/memory on processor performance. The memory and chipset make a big difference in performance. They tested the same processor on different boards. The difference between a PC133A board abd a DDR 2700 board was about 50%. R

 

[DieHardware]

One more Biostar, no onboard video but another choice anyway...M7VIW

 

[Bonesdad]

Originally posted by: RickH
SELL the RAM!!! Don't spend $$ on old, slow, stuff. All the boards listed can only use 2 sticks of memory so you will only have 512MB. You can sell the 3sticks of 256Mbs for as much or more than 512MB of "modern" memory. The system will be more current than a PC 133 based sysytem. Toms Hardware had a good article on the effect of chipset/memory on processor performance. The memory and chipset make a big difference in performance. They tested the same processor on different boards. The difference between a PC133A board abd a DDR 2700 board was about 50%. R

This is for a 5 and 8 year old...don't think they are going to be wowed by DDR memory. How many MB of RAM does "Dress up Barbie" use anyway? K7S5A is a perfect rig for this

 

[Peter]

Seconded. Many people here just lack the perspective

Difference between PC133 and DDR2700 RAM - with an Athlon processor - isn't even 50 percent if you measure pure RAM throughput. In real life applications, it's more like 5 percent, maybe 10 if your application profile is extremely bandwidth bound. Pentium-4 in turn is EXTREMELY dependent on fast RAM, so the only thing to avoid is a P4 system w/ SDR RAM. Worse still if it's a Celeron.

 

[RickH]

Hey smart a$$ did you look at the article I referred to or just pull those words of wisdom out thin air?? The platform makes a big difference in processor performance. Read the article on Tom's http://www.tomshardware.com/motherboard/20030303/index.html

The K7S5A was a poor board 3 years ago, do you think it got better with age. The only way the 735 chipset performs is with DDR memory, not PC133.
If you have buy a processor, video card and a motherboard why spend $45 on something that was second rate 3 years ago when for $20 more you can get a board with the best current AMD chipset, LAN, sound and a future.
If you are going to spend money, spend it on something current. Just because the girls are playing "Reader Rabbit" this week, they maybe playing "Barbie in the land of Doom3" by summer. Be ready, kid?s interests change rapidly. R

 

[vexingv]

Originally posted by: RickH
If you are going to spend money, spend it on something current. Just because the girls are playing "Reader Rabbit" this week, they maybe playing "Barbie in the land of Doom3" by summer. Be ready, kid?s interests change rapidly. R

lol,..the daughters are 5 and 8 yrs old as mentioned in the OP...
and the k7s5a is a very solid board...had one 2 yrs ago and gave it away to my bro and its still doing fine for what he needs with it

 

[Peter]

K7S5A was the fastest Athlon board when it came out - did you even read the articles, back then?

I chose to inform people here directly instead of sending them off site to read articles, what's wrong with that? I'm just being useful, rather than name calling. You, sir, bore me.

 

[RickH]

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=27&threadid=1271699[/S]

 

[myocardia]

Link It's called the "http" button, and it works wonders for people wanting to link.

 

[Soulkeeper]

you can pick up a kt133a board for like 20 or 30 bucks and a fx5200 (current dx9 nvidia budget video card) for under 60 bucks
i suggest doing that
it's alright to get onboard sound but i suggest getting a recent budget video card if you don't want any problems with your kids trying to play games like "toy story" or "lego land"
from my experience i would say a large majority of those people out there that bought a dell or gateway with integrated graphics for their first system regret it now (or just don't know why it don't do certain things and/or already upgraded it)


also athlon xp cpu's are pretty cheap right now if you need a cpu too

websites you might wanna check out:


pricewatch.com to check all prices on websites for hardware
newegg.com nice selection my personal favorite
justdeals.com place that sells old motherboards for like 20 bucks

good luck !!

 

[RickH]

You can pick up a KT133a board from Justdeals for $30 + $15 shipping. Remember all those bulging capacitors on the boards of that era?? Also make sure you choose the processor with the correct die. The most of older boards don't support the newer XPs. I would not spend $45 on an old board when you can spend $65 including shipping on an AN35N n force2 board. I have purchased boards from Justdeals. If you are replacing a dead board and have all the parts from the old machine they are a good resource for older boards.


Myocardia--did you link your "link" to anything?? It doesn't work for me. R

 

[tcsenter]

I suspected you weren't going to be heart-broken over a slight memory performance hit, or you would have said something rather dumb like "I wan't to use my PC133 SDRAM but I want memory performance comparable to Dual Channel Ultra-OCZ Golden Sample PC3200 with Heat Spreader."

One might have believed it reasonable to infer from the very fact you want to recycle some PC133 SDRAM that you'd rather not spend as much or more on new RAM as you would the motherboard. That kind of thing just blows straight over some people's heads, for reasons I'll never figure out.

You could just as well have asked about "sound economical transportation" for your teenage daughter and without fail someone will offer something along the lines of "Anything less than a 2004 BMW M3 is obsolete and undriveable." There's one in every crowd.

If you want a fairly "modern" chipset, try the SIS651 board. Granted, things like six integrated USB2.0 ports, ATA133, 6 Channel Audio, 10/100Mbps LAN, PC2700 DDR, MuTIOL 533MB/s interconnect, and support for all 533FSB Intel processors with Hyper Threading are like prehistoric 2003 technology.