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"Hardware n' Stuff"

Hi,
please enlighten me if you can,

1. Do any types of AMD Athlons work with SDRAM, if so, which ones.

2. Im getting a Maxtor D740X ATA133, but my mobo only has an ATA100 controller thing (whatever), I presume it will still work, only at a maximum of 100mbs, but will this create a data bottleneck if the transfer rat starts peaking over 100mbs?

3. How much more faster and more powerful is the average
GF3 Ti200 from the GF2 Ti, is it worth the extra money?

Thanks.

McNAB wrote:
> I was just thinking of getting a new Graphics card, hopefully GF£ TI200,
> then a new Athlon, running on SDRAM, then a long wait to let the coffers
> recover, then a new mobo, with a healthy portion of DDRRAM.

Fair enough, sounds like a plan, altough if you're keeping your current mobo for now you'll be limited as to what athlon you can buy...I tend to save and do mobo/cpu/ram at the same time. Seems to have failed be this time, cpu playing up...I blame Asus.

Hehehe, i'll
> flog all the old stuff to my mate, hes gonna upgrade his puny PII350 and Voodoo
> 2. Reckon i can flog 2nd hand GF2 MX for £40?

Sure, as long as they don't know too much about pricing...they were going for about that much at i8, but that tends to demand lower prices as most people there know what they're doing..

Well, DDR ram will speed up your system in general, yes. Most problems with swapfiles come from a lack of RAM, it wont use one unless there's none available, so a large amount of SDRAM would still perform better than swapping to disk...30ns instead of 7ms..

What's the rest of the spec of the box?

I was just thinking of getting a new Graphics card, hopefully GF£ TI200, then a new Athlon, running on SDRAM, then a long wait to let the coffers recover, then a new mobo, with a healthy portion of DDRRAM.

Hehehe, i'll flog all the old stuff to my mate, hes gonna upgrade his puny PII350 and Voodoo 2. Reckon i can flog 2nd hand GF2 MX for £40?

Will it not bring around a performance boost, because when you are running a game which uses the swapfile alot, your system is depending on the data there to run the game. Butif this is all on the RAM, especially DDRRAM, where everything is much faster, no time will be wasted with the HD, allowing the game to run faster? If you see what i mean.

I have done benchmarks with the 4s against the 3s for my GF3, but from what I've heard on the ocuk forums, they make quite a significant difference for some people. Getting working ones is another story - I had to drop back from the latest release, as my box (XP1600, GF3, 512mb DDR) was struggling to run a 2 year old game at 1024x768..

SDRAM wont slow the Athlon itself down (as long as you get PC133, or a mobo that supports different speeds for the cpu/ram/pci buses), but the general performance of your system will drop - exactly how much by depends on what you're using it for. To be honest, I don't see the point of going for SDRAM now, the price is about level with DDR (well, was, until they shot up just before christmas), it's being phased out on motherboards now, and DDR is predicted to be around until at least 2004..

Mmmm, butter and marmite toast.

Thanks guys.

Running an Athlon with SDRAM not DDR will slow it down, but by how much?

How much do the Detonator4 drivers increase performance from the Detonator3 ones?

McNAB wrote:
> Hi,
please enlighten me if you can,

Okey

1. Do any types of AMD Athlons work
> with SDRAM, if so, which ones.

Any Athlon will work with SDRAM as long as the motherboard supports it. Most new ones now are DDR, so check that it's an sdram mobo.

2. Im getting a Maxtor D740X ATA133, but my
> mobo only has an ATA100 controller thing (whatever), I presume it will still
> work, only at a maximum of 100mbs, but will this create a data bottleneck if the
> transfer rat starts peaking over 100mbs?

Nope, I'm getting this exact HDD, and it wont cause any extra bottlenecks - but believe me, there are already plenty in your system, and enough to ensure that the transfer rate will never go above 100mbs.

3. How much more faster and more
> powerful is the average
GF3 Ti200 from the GF2 Ti, is it worth the extra
> money?

It's definately worth the extra money, as you should be able to pick one up for around £170..look out for the MSI version..the GF" Ti is fast, but the GF3 has the advantages of the nFiniteFX gpu (or whatever the PR department called it..), it just runs at lower clock speed and throws around less polys than its older brothers.

Thanks.

No prob.

Definitely possible on Linux, but I doubt you'd get any performance increase at all. OSs only use virtual memory if they have to. That is, if they run out of RAM. When all memory and swap (or "virtual memory") run out, then the system dies. However, the chances of you actually using 1.5gb of RAM are very tiny, but if you do use it all you'll want some swap as well.

Yeah, remember me from the summer, always wih the questions.

Anyway, more questions, this is the big one.

If this was a perfect world, and i had, oh lets say, 1.5gb of RAM, and then i decided to disable virtual memory, what OSs would this be possible on, and would this help performance, if so how much.

I'll be back with more questions.

Hi,
please enlighten me if you can,

1. Do any types of AMD Athlons work with SDRAM, if so, which ones.

2. Im getting a Maxtor D740X ATA133, but my mobo only has an ATA100 controller thing (whatever), I presume it will still work, only at a maximum of 100mbs, but will this create a data bottleneck if the transfer rat starts peaking over 100mbs?

3. How much more faster and more powerful is the average
GF3 Ti200 from the GF2 Ti, is it worth the extra money?

Thanks.