Thinking of an Upgrade but been out of the loop for awhile any help

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Crow T Robot

I have been considering upgrading my PC to an Intel 3.06ghz and going back
to DDR ram now my main problem is which motherboard???

Been looking at the Soyo SYP4I865PE Plus Dragon 2 is this board any good?
Mainly looking at it because of the Serial HD connector as I might go that
way down the road. Are there better boards out there? Has DDR taken over
as opposed to RDRAM?

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Crow T Robot said:
I have been considering upgrading my PC to an Intel 3.06ghz and going back
to DDR ram now my main problem is which motherboard???

Been looking at the Soyo SYP4I865PE Plus Dragon 2 is this board any good?
Mainly looking at it because of the Serial HD connector as I might go that
way down the road.
Click to expand...

I would not invest in SerialATA just yet. At this point it is only a
gimmick. Sure, it may be a little easier to hook up, but you get absolutely
NO increase in performance as the controller is still tied to the PCI bus,
which has a maximum throughput of 133MB/s ... limiting the theoretical
bandwidth of 150MB/s down to ATA133 speeds. And technically speaking even
modern HDD's with 8MB caches still can't touch the theoretical 133MB/s that
ATA133 offers.
Are there better boards out there?
Click to expand...

Chipset wise I think the 865PE is the top of the heap these days (correct me
if I'm wrong). I don't know much about Soyo, but they are a good name.
Has DDR taken over as opposed to RDRAM?
Click to expand...

Pretty much, yeah ... The bandwidth that RDRAM afforded used to be crucial
to the P4's performance, but DDR has closed up the speed issue, and it's
wider data bus (especially in dual-channel mode) makes DDR a superior memory
technology. And Intel, of course, is going to use whatever memory
architecture makes it's product shine the best ;-) why do you think they
went with the proprietary, expensive RDRAM in the first place?


Drumguy
 
Can't say much about Serial ATA. The current 150 MHz version is not supposed
to offer performance advantages over plain old parallel ATA, though.

If you're getting a mainboard based on the Intel 865PE chipset, I suggest
that you get an 800 MHz FSB (front side bus) CPU that can take maximum
advantage of the dual channel DDR capability. A 3.06 GHz CPU (533 MHz FSB)
would run, but it would be something of a waste. The 3.0c would be more
appropriate. (The 3.2c would be a waste of money.)

Intel appears to have switched its bets from RDRAM to dual channel DDR. The
fastest RDRAM so far was PC1066, which gave a theoretical bandwidth of 4267
MHz. Dual DDR400 (PC3200) DDR gives a theoretical bandwidth of 6400 MHz.
(The performance of real systems won't reflect these numbers, but dual DDR
is still the fastest.)

Other choices of mainboard? I use an Asus P4P800 (non-deluxe). It's another
865PE board. How it compares to the Soyo, don't know. (The Asus board is
very good for overclocking, as in running a 2.6c at 13*250 MHz = 3.25 GHz.)

HTH.

Bob Knowlden

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