Looks like a lot has already been answered.
1. I prefer a GF2 over the Radeon. Only at very high resolutions does the Radeon approach the level of performance of the Gf2. (Get a Gf2 gts, pro, or ultra. The Mx are getting kinda slow now.)
2. As for the DDR ram, don't worry to much about this yet. Current performance benchmarks are showing only a maximum of 5% or so improvement. The a7v133 uses the kt133a chipset, and thus pc133 sdram. DO NOT buy the a7a266, that uses an Ali chipset, which is probably the worst POS (piece of silicon
) ever slapped onto a MB. If you really want DDR, go with the a7m266. This uses the AMD 760 chipset. Personally I would wait, as DDR ram carries extra expense without real performance gains. Check out
www.anandtech.com and
www.tomshardware.com to see what I'm talking about. Specifically the benchmark parts of these two:
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1451&p=1 http://www.tomshardware.com/mainboard/01q2/010416/index.html I'll let you decide what you want to do, but personally DDR currently seems a waste of money really. You MUST have a 133 MHz FSB type Athlon to even get
equal performance to the pc133 sdram kt133 in many cases! Notice that on the ALI Magik 1 in particular if the DDR ram is at 1600 speeds it actually performs worse than pc100 sdram.
3. Heatsinks: I'm not exactly recommending that one from Germany, I just think it is pretty neat.
Go here:
http://www4.tomshardware.com/cpu/01q1/010306/cooler-01.html if you want to learn more about it.
http://www.noisecontrol.de./international/oversea/eng_info_page.htm this is the small english part of their page.
If the price of this one scares you (it should, and I'd really only consider it for overclocking) then you might try finding one called the "thermoengine" many people have had good luck with it. I believe
www.coolerguys.com is a major heatsink retailer. The volcano 2 isn't bad and is pretty quiet. If noise is a concern, most of these heatsinks with the "black label" Delta fan ARE NOT FOR YOU!
Unless you like the sound of a jet engine taking off.
Your other choices look very good. As said above, read the other posts and install your soundcard last. Mainly you'll want to install the via 4-in-1 4.29s right after you get Windows installed. They can be downloaded from
www.viahardware.com . Since they are probably a zip file, unzip them and burn them to a cd on your old computer, since you have a burner. There will be 4 drivers .exe files that get unzipped. Some of those will also extract themselves. If they do, just find the setup file and run it. The 2 most important drivers are the .inf and agp drivers. The busmaster really isn't neccesary if you just check dma in device manager for your drives. That said, it doesn't hurt to install all 4 of them.
Feel free to ask more questions.
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bloom25
-MAW-
(Formerly of the)
THUNDERBIRDS
[This message has been edited by bloom25 (edited 04-17-2001).]
