MB /cpu upgrade question

[ron2368]

I have a p3 800 and wanted to upgrade to a faster chip. Cost wise the athlon 1700 or 1800 seems good. I was leaning towards getting a gigabyte 7zxe mb since it has the kt133a chipset and I can re-use the 133 sdram I have. Is it a decent choice to do this or should I get a ddr memory based mb, how much of a step up in speed would that be?

The cost for above upgrade would be about 160 so thats not bad cash wise. If anyone has any advice on this please do so. Thank you so much for reading and/or responding.

 

[kgraeme]

What sound card do you use, and do you use your computer in a way that data integrety is of absolute importance? The KT133A chipset has the 686B southbridge which has known issues. I don't recall the Gigabyte board being one of the worst offenders, so that's something in it's favor. Pairing a Creative sound card from the Live! up can trigger the problem. Symptoms include crackling sound, sudden screaching and lockups. In some cases data writing to drives could also be corrupted. High-data situations like copying large files, video processing, etc could also cause problems.

Replacing the Creative sound card with another brand such as Turtle Beach generally cleared up the worst of the problems. I still had problems if I tried to copy across to my raid controller, but that was about it. Just going to a standard IDE configuration and ignoring the raid ports solved the problem. This was with an Iwill KK266-R.

After working around those issues, the board was generally quite stable and easy to work with. Personally, upgrading right now I would (and did) get a DDR P4 chip/board.

 

[ron2368]

The Gigabyte board I am interested in has on board AC97 sound and I have no need to upgrade that. I have a gigabyte now with my P3 800 and it has been really decent as far as I can tell, think its a via pro. Thanks