Motherboards and Socket A

[episodic]

I've got an ASUS KT-400 and an Athlon 3000+ 333mhz chip which is supported fully.


I was curious as to what effect changing a motherboard woudl have on the system? Would a KT800 or KT600 make my system faster? What about and NFORCE board?


What is the effect of the motherboard on system speed?

 

[Sensai]

kt400 has a poor memory controller onboard..... the kt400a tweaks it to get more memory performance,.....kt600 just has additional features and an updated south bridge...... nforce 2 boards allow dual channel memory mode as long as you have matching sticks with same specs or timings which should make your performance ~5-10% better than a single channel mode and on boards like the kt400 or 600 or sis745???. Dual channel technically doubles the bandwidth, but you wont see that. Also depending on the version of the board and bios, you may have more options to tweak memory timings, cpu multipliers if u have an unlocked cpu, and better fsb ranges to modify your total cpu speed. Some boards like the epox 8rda3+, abit nfs 2, dfi lan parties have higher range northbridge voltages and ram voltages for better ocing.

 

[DaveSimmons]

For only a 5-10% difference you're much better off putting the money towards an A64 system, especially for gaming where even an A64 2800+ is much faster than your 3000+

 

[allanon1965]

i second that, just built my first amd64 rig, consisting of an entry level setup. ecs kn1 extreme 939 mb, amd64 3000+, and a geforce5750 pciexpress videocard....this replaced a 2500 barton running at 2.2ghz, gforce Ti4600 128mb, and asus nforce2 mb....this new system blows the old outta the water in my games! and just runs noticably faster overall....both systems were running 1gb of pc3200 ddr....go 64 and pci express and dont look back! mine is what i consider entry level, imagine what a mid to high performing setup could do!

 

[Sensai]

lol, i wasnt mentioning anything about an A64 because he wasnt asking about one or looking to buy one..... just the differences between one socket 462 chipset and another

 

[Zepper]

The KT400 was kind of a stopgap to try to stem the bleeding when the nV chipsets started hitting the channel. The KT600 is substantially better and the KT880 is better yet (comparable with anyting else for Sock-A). I'm running an Abit KW7 now and it helps my puny Duron 1600 quite a bit (coming up from a KT266a). In between I also ran a couple of versions of the Asus KT600 mobo (A7V600/600-x) and there was a noticeable bump there too. Newegg has a couple of Asrock KT880 mobos in the Refurb section for very low bucks.

.bh.