MoBo Today for Tomorrow's chips

[SteelCityFan]

I am on the verge of upgrading to a P4 1.8A as soon as Uncle Sam sends me my refund. I am looking ahead to the 533Mhz FSB and the PC1066 RDRAM. I have decided to go with the RDRAM (PC800) since it outperforms DDR and right now is cheaper in many cases.

Does anyone have any information on which currently selling motherboards will most likely release a BIOS upgrade to officially support the new FSB and RDRAM spec. Will this even happen? I don't want to buy a new MoBo and RAM this close to a major upgrade... and then be stuck with a 2.2 or 2.4Ghz cap if all subsequent Intel chips are released with a 533FSB. I really need to upgrade soon since my desktop won't handle a new game I bought very well at all. (Nascar 2002 reccomends a P3 800.) I would like to be able to slap a new CPU and RAM in the same board and have it be recognized and run at 533FSB/PC1066.

The trouble is that none of them can come out and officially say they will support it since Intel has not released the chips yet...

Does anyone know if intel plans to downscale the new FSB to say the 2Ghz chip?... to enable buying a 533FSB for less than the premium that will be on the 2.53 chip.

Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[hausdave]

I have built a few systems withthe Soyo P4s ultra and I must say that it is an excellent platform and supports future memory. You can read up on the sis 645 chipset and you will find it performs quite admirably.

 

[SteelCityFan]

DDR333 preforms just about as good as RDRAM at current CPU speeds, but as the chip speeds increase, DDR just can't keep up... this is shown by several Tom's Hardware stories...

DDR333 and RDRAM are the same price.. and RDRAM is lower in many cases. I don't see a valid argument for DDR at the current prices.

 

[Oyeve]

You definately need to get a board with RDRAM as DDR ram, while good and all that, will most likely be hitting some sort of limit soon. Just remember this rule of thumb though. Nothing in the computer world is ever future proof. Who knows, maybe there will me some DDR2 or something like that.