the asus a7m266 mobo is getting a bit old and I was upset with it at first because I ordered an asus a7v266 and they gave me a a7m instead but after nonstop rock solid reliability the a7m266 has so far offered I said if it aint broke dont fix it and to hell with the small performance gain a faster motherboard would offer.
I had no problems assembling my computer.
the meticulous part which you have to be precise with is installing the cpu into the motherboard and then installing the heatsink/fan on top of the cpu core (very critical w amd cpus which will burn up in 30 seconds without a heatsink attached!)
be tedious in setting the jumpers correctly on the motherboard and on your cd roms/and drives/zipdrives/dvdroms etc so that the master and slave are correctly sequenced, check them dont rely on factory to set them correctly.
everything else pops into place and connects to the power supply.
fastest amd mobos are the new viakt266a mobos which are very fast (faster than asus a7m266 and a7v266) all because of the little "a" at the end
fastest available amd processors available now are the palmino athalonxp processors.
AMD is cheap dirt cheap.
I dont believe the hype that AMD and fans say that a 1.4ghz tweaked out amd cpu/mobo rig with identical peripherals matched or beat a p4 2ghz that is tweaked out in the same fashion in a framerate video game race.
but it is a true that a 1.4ghz amd266 tbird is faster (much faster)in video games framerate races than a p4 1.5ghz
the 3dmark fps dweeb guage shows that ultra tweaked out p4 2ghz machines are scoring as high as 10,000 while tweaked amd 1.4ghz (non xp) tops out around 8000 for ultra perfectly tweaked systems with each using a geforce3 ti500...
but they are both so friggin fast who gives a crap.
buy the AMD tbird 266fsb ($120) or amd athalon xp 1.53ghz (~$260)and you have enough pennies left to upgrade when you would like too.
if you buy the friggin INTEL $900 somthing dollar p4 2ghz cpu with the rdram you will not have many pennies left and will have to upgrade at a later time if on same budget as buying amd.
pretty much cost analysis type stuff for us poor people.
considering the fact that computers go obsolete in a year or less buying ultra expensive top of the line stuff when you could buy cost effective top of the line stuff is downright idiotic for this type of application.
many thanks to creamo who saved me from pissing money away on a p4 2 ghz
[ 10-15-2001: Message edited by: Citabria ]
