New motherboard shopping questions....

[Tazdrummer]

Well, I am starting to look at upgrading the machine here and I am considering for once in my life with going with an Intel chip. I have always been an AMD guy but I am considering buying a P4.

Can anyone offer any opinions on P4's with RAMBUS and P4's with SDRAM (or DDR RAM.... can it be done?).

See, I had heard a few bad things about RAMBUS RAM and I wanted to get some first hand opinions.

[JungleMan1]

If I were to get a P4 which I would NOT, I would at least get a p4/DDR board. My friend in England has one and he says it kicks a$$..and DDR333 will be faster in many applications than RDRAM.

P4s with SDRAM are OK for basic use, but not much else. And if you're buying a system for basic use, just go with a Celeron.

On another note, why are you switchin to La In-hella? As long as you have good cooling Athlons are fine, and Darren has a great, quiet cooler called the Antec Jetcool.

But to each his own.

[davidclark]

Can anyone offer any opinions on P4's with RAMBUS and P4's with SDRAM (or DDR RAM.... can it be done?).

Ask ten techs that question, and you'll have eleven answers.

I remain skeptical of RamBus. Stick with SDRAM. And 512mb sticks are about 55 bucks. If we can get a war going, we'll see even more improvement in technolgies related business.

[konis]

it's actually really simple if you know the destination ip address of the site that you access with dial up account. Use the route command and set a static route that deals with that particular ip address otherwise all other ip traffic should be set to use the network adapter.

[konis]

oops sorry...wrong window thus wrong topic....

[Tazdrummer]

To answer the Jungle boys question....

1) I am a cheap skate....
2) I am liking the look of a P4 1.5 Gig processor for $125, and the Athlon XP 1500 (which ISNT a 1500Mhz or 1.5 Gig) being about the same price.... now I kinda seem a little skeptical about AMD

3) Intel p4=400Mhz bus speed
AMD Athlon=266Mhz bus speed

You do the math

and Finally....

4) I am a gamer.... but a married gamer. I dont believe in getting the latest and greatest, I believe in getting some close, whatever I can afford that is close.

[PitaBred]

400MHz on a narrow pipeline. It's just like the 1.5GHz Intel vs. the 1.33GHz AMD. The DDR is a different type of memory. The rambus has amazing bandwidth IF it's sequential accessing. But typically you don't have a lot of sequential memory access, uless you're playing a movie or doing some streaming media. Which is what the p4 kicks *** at. SDRAM has much lower latencies and switching speed than RDRAM does. I can get the numbers and go into the math if anyone cares, but that's time I can't take right now as I'm rushing off to school here

Taz: The p4 is a good processor, but the T-bird 1400 beats the 1.6GHz p4 in everything but Quake3. Just to let you know. And the T-bird is cheaper than the 1.5GHz p4.

Also, I would very much recommend against SDR SDRAM no matter what the engine. It's like running a hot rod car on 5" wheels. It's got a damn big engine, but it won't be doing much without the data flowing to it.

Anyway, I've rambled enough. Have fun choosing

David

[Fubarian]

if you think that a 3.2gb bandwidth would be useful to you, by all means, go with rambus, BUT if you do simple things, the sd chipset will do ya just fine.