P4 Dual memory

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WoofWoof

I saw reference to an ECS P4 mb the other day which would accept
either DDR memory or PC100/133 memory. It struck me that might be a
painless way of gradually updating an aging P3V4X machine of mine.
(Not trying to make it top-of-the-line ... just a bit more recent).

Are there any P4 ASUS mb's that take both kinds of memory. I'd prefer
to stay with ASUS since I'm familiar with them but info on other
manufacturers would be welcome too (particularly if ASUS doesn't cover
this configuration).
 
WoofWoof said:
I saw reference to an ECS P4 mb the other day which would accept
either DDR memory or PC100/133 memory. It struck me that might be a
painless way of gradually updating an aging P3V4X machine of mine.
(Not trying to make it top-of-the-line ... just a bit more recent).

Are there any P4 ASUS mb's that take both kinds of memory. I'd prefer
to stay with ASUS since I'm familiar with them but info on other
manufacturers would be welcome too (particularly if ASUS doesn't cover
this configuration).
Click to expand...

I don't think Asus makes any boards that take both. It doesn't make much
sense to upgrade to a Pentium 4 if you're not going to upgrade the RAM,
PC133 will greatly slow down a newer CPU..
 
Robert said:
I don't think Asus makes any boards that take both. It doesn't make much
sense to upgrade to a Pentium 4 if you're not going to upgrade the RAM,
PC133 will greatly slow down a newer CPU..
Click to expand...

I agree it wouldn't make sense if I was never going to upgrade the ram
but it does allow me to get the system up and running with the old ram
and spread the upgrade cost over several months. If you are living on
a fixed (pension) income, such things can be important.
 
WoofWoof said:
I agree it wouldn't make sense if I was never going to upgrade the ram
but it does allow me to get the system up and running with the old ram
and spread the upgrade cost over several months. If you are living on
a fixed (pension) income, such things can be important.
Click to expand...

I have a P4B and three sticks of 512MB SDRAM I got cheap. I bought
it at the time, as I already had the memory. The advice I got at the
time, is buying more than a 1.8GHz processor wouldn't be a good
purchase, as the processor would be starved by the use of the
SDRAM. So, as long as your expectations from a board like
that are not too high, it is a usable machine. Only serious
gaming would be hampered.

Revision 1.05 or greater comes equipped with "AGP Warn" protection
against illegally keyed video cards. With earlier boards, some
really old (3.3V only) video cards, which didn't have the keys
cut properly on the AGP connector, can damage the P4B Northbridge.
The AGP Warn circuit stops that from happening, and turns off the power.

http://web.archive.org/web/20041205211907/http://www.asus.com.tw/mb/socket478/P4B/specification.htm

The era of mixed ram modes, was something like A7A266 or TUA266. I
bought a TUA266 and it was a mistake. The AGP slot was an unstable
piece of trash. In any case, you can see a picture here. This
is a S370 P3 era board:

http://web.archive.org/web/20040205190803/www.asus.com.tw/mb/socket370/tua266/overview.htm

If you wish to do this style of "retro shopping", start here.
Web.archive.org takes snapshots of websites and contains an amazing
amount of data. Note that, some websites don't get archived carefully,
as the website code must be manually edited. You may have to copy
and hand edit the links on some of the archived pages to get them to
work. That is great fun :-)

http://web.archive.org/*/http://www.asus.com.tw/mb/mbindex.htm

Enjoy,
Paul
 
Paul said:
I have a P4B and three sticks of 512MB SDRAM I got cheap. I bought
it at the time, as I already had the memory. The advice I got at the
time, is buying more than a 1.8GHz processor wouldn't be a good
purchase, as the processor would be starved by the use of the
SDRAM. So, as long as your expectations from a board like
that are not too high, it is a usable machine. Only serious
gaming would be hampered.
Click to expand...


I'm not even into non-serious (frivolous?) gaming so that wouldn't be
a problem ... especially as an interim step. Thanks for this response,
Paul. Lot's of good information and I appreciate it!
 
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