[ale] looking to upgrade

[Geoffrey]

Vernard Martin wrote:
> On Sat, 2002-10-12 at 19:18, Geoffrey wrote:

> Heh. Damned near ANYTHING will be a helluva jump. Sincee you were
> surviving on an 800, you might want to look at the midrange stuff
> instead of the absolutely top end. AMD XP 2000+ cpus cost $99 at GinStar
> and you can get a motherboard that will support both PC-133 and DDR
> memory (although not simultaneously) for about $70.

I wouldn't mind finding a board that would support both types of memory, 
as I could take the .5 g pc133 out of my current box and move it to the 
new box, put off buying new memory for a while.  I was checking out 
pricewatch.com and could only find motherboards that support intel 
processors.  I was hoping to move to an amd architecture this time 
around.  Any pointers to athlon mb that supports pc133 and ddr?

>>One other question.  This thing comes with an 8x agp, but my current vid 
>>card is 4x.  Will the 4x work?  I'm not really looking at upgrading the 
>>vid card just yet.  I was hoping that the agp would work like memory and 
>>hard drives, in that you could put 'slower' stuff in there and it would 
>>still work.
> 
> 
> yes, your current video card will work. However, the key thing to
> remember about AGP is that unless you are doing high end gaming, odds
> are that your motherboard/video combination isn't stressing the AGP bus
> anyway. I seem to recall reading various reviews on
> http://www.tomshardware.com, http://www.sharkyextreme.com and
> http://www.anandtech.com that indicate that only if you are running very
> high resolutions (i.e. > 1280x1024) at 24bpp then you aren't using
> enough bandwidth to stress the AGP 4X bus. Check those websites for the
> exact nubmers as my memory is a bit sketchy on the exact resolutoins and
> such. 

It's only a 32 mb card, so I run 1400x1050 at 16bpp.  I was hoping to 
get a dual head setup working, I've got a ragepro pci card as well.  The 
agp card has vga and digital out, but I figured I didn't want to split 
the 32mb across to heads.

> 
> Expandability is very nice but unless you already use those types of
> things, its just wasted flexibility. I'


Well, I like to try and go through at least two processors per 
motherboard, as I did with my current board.  Thus, if I can get a board 
that supports the higher end processors, I can look at going that route 
when the price for them becomes something I think is reasonable.

> 
> hope this helps
> 
> V

-- 
Until later: Geoffrey		esoteric at 3times25.net

I didn't have to buy my radio from a specific company to listen
to FM, why doesn't that apply to the Internet (anymore...)?


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