[ale] looking to upgrade

[Vernard Martin]

On Sat, 2002-10-12 at 20:49, Geoffrey wrote:
> 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?


Well, the Asus A7A266 does this. Has 2DDR slots and 3SDR slots. Can't
use them at the same time so its all DDR or all SDR. Works just fine.
And it supports amd cpus up to XP2400+ at the moment. Can flash the
motherboard for higher support I seem to recall. Also, Elements makes
one that does this as well.

> 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.

Yeah, probably not a good idea to share that memory if you are running
high resolution on both heads. Also, many of the cards don't support the
same speed ramdac on both heads so you CAN'T do the same
resolution/refresh rate on both heads. I remember that the first version
of the matrox dual head cards did this. Very annoying.

> 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.

well, depend on how often you want to upgrade your cpu it might not be
reasonable. That may not be reasonable. If you upgrade once every 6
months you can probably do this. If you do it once a year, then you have
to make sure that the cpu manufacture doesn't plan on chanigng the form
factor or the way they twiddle their cpus to get extra speed out of
them. Sometimes a motherboard can't support a faster cpu with just a
bios upgrade even if the cpu uses the same pin out.

V
-- 
   Vernard Martin (vernard at cc.gatech.edu)
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~vernard/ 
   Rules to live by: 1) Don't sweat the small stuff. 2) Its all small
stuff.

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