"formerprof" said:
At present I'm running the P4C800E-Deluxe with a 3.0 Northwood & 1 gig of
PC3200 memory. I'd like to try a 64-bit processor. Is there an ASUS board &
(presumably) AMD processor which will give increased performance over my
present rig? It would be nice if I could use my present 512 M memory sticks
in it.
Thanks to all.
formerprof
I haven't been tracking developments that closely on Athlon64,
but the use of a built-in memory controller is a double edged
sword. It means if you are attempting to build a system with
the intent to fill it with RAM sticks, you need to do a lot of
research in the private forums, to figure out exactly how to
get there.
You also have to decide whether this project is a
non-overclocking or an overclocking one. You can buy a high end
Athlon64, pay the hundreds of bucks for a processor, and use
virtually any Asus product and be happy.
In a similar vein to the AthlonXP story, many people wish to buy
a cheaper processor and overclock it, and that is where the
fun starts.
1) Boards without locks, will probably go from a CPU clock of 200MHz
to 227MHz, before the PCI or AGP clocks are too high for their
respective cards. K8V might fall into this catagory, although
if you look around, I think there are a few tricks to get
higher (use an older video card, fiddle with HT etc).
2) Boards with AGP/PCI locks aren't as common. The A8V revision 2 is
supposed to have a working lock, and then you might expect to get
to 250MHz or so.
3) Above this, apparently some manufacturers have made mistakes in
the way their SATA disk drives derive a clock. It is possible to
get a higher FSB clock than 250MHz, if limitations like that
are fixed, or if you only connect to an IDE interface.
4) The current record for DDR memory, is over DDR600 on a DFI board.
You should start by reading reviews on Anandtech, for the AMD
offerings from various companies, to understand how things stack
up in the overclocking arena.
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2198&p=1
Who would have thought an Athlon64 would do DDR600
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2198&p=6
Paul
