My upgrade - Athlon, Asus, DDR memory...

[beet1e]

I've decided to upgrade. I will replace my A7V133 mobo with a A7V333. I'll get an Athlon 2200 and 256 MB of DDR memory.

Have a good laugh at our UK prices, and when you've finished, can someone please explain to me how DDR memory works? I currently have 256MB of SDRAM and use W-ME for AH and W2000 Pro for everything else. Would I benefit from 512MB of DDR RAM? What differences would I notice in AH? And lastly, I have an Elsa Gladiac Ultra vid card - GeForce 2. It works well. How does it stack up with the later GeForce4 cards? GeForce4 is SO expensive here

PS - what are the Athlon multiprocessors, and what advantages do they offer?

[Animal]

If possible get 512 it does make a difference, 256 is the bare minimum right now. In fact if you have to get a slower CPU do so just so that you can get 512mb

[Hussein]

Beet1e the difference between DDR and SDR ram simplified is that DDR can deliver two bits of data in the same time that SDR can deliver one. That increases your memory bandwith and performance with applications which crunch a lot of data.

With RAM, more is always better. Although with most applications today 256Mb is quite enough, 512 never hurts - or even more if you got the dough.

Keep in mind though that as technology advances even the present DDR will soon be obsolete so dont invest your life savings in it.

What difference will you see in AH? Probably none whatsoever. Possibly reduced startup time, gaming performance is controlled almost totally by your display cards ram which already is fast DDR type in your case. Still you will HAVE to get DDR if you get the v333 board.

The geforce2 ultra is a nice card, but it's getting outdated fast. If you can still play AH happily with it, fine.. But the new Geforce4 cards will leave it on the startup line.

My advice is keep your ultra for now and when the prices on the new Radeon9700 come down to humane levels, get that one

[bloom25]

If I remember right beetle, you are a hardware guy.  The actual difference is that one bank of ram on each stick is falling edge, rather than rising edge triggered.  That means data can be transfered twice per clock cycle.

As for performance differences, depending on the application they will be minor to major.  It all depends on whether the extra memory bandwidth is useful to them or not.

Your choices look good, but be aware that board has a LOT of tweaking and configuration jumpers and options.  Be prepared to do some manual reading.

Also be sure you've got a very good cooler and powersupply with that setup.  For the money, I might also suggest a 2100+ CPU and extra ram.

[Sox62]

Here is my take on the video card....if you play on a 17" monitor,or only play at 1280 x 1024,your present card is fine.

If you want to play at 1600 x 1200 with all the bells and whistles(anti-aliasing,etc),then it may be time to upgrade the video card.

[eagl]

Don't get a new high-end vid card now.  The new ATI card just hit the streets (reports coming in of reviews of retail cards) and NVidia will release a new card before the end of the year.  The new ATI card is currently the fastest gaming card out there AND it's image quality blows away the GeForce 4 for about the same price as the best GF4.

So why wait?  NVidia will most likely add one more "refresh" of it's GF4 line before it releases it's next new design, and while it still probably won't beat the ATI card for image quality and speed, it WILL drive the price of the entire market down.

If you can't wait, the best bang for the buck is the GF4 4200.  I'd get the 128 meg version to lengthen the lifespan of the card, but the 64 meg version will be marginally faster on TODAY's games.

I have a 64 meg GF2 GTS and about the only things it won't do are ansiotropic filtering which "should" get rid of shimmery textures, and FSAA without amassive framerate hit.  In the meantime, I'm running AH at 1280x1024x32 with framerates well over 45fps so I think I can afford to wait.  I care about framerate and resolution more than the other details anyhow, so it's just fine for me now.

Within a year or so, I expect the games and card prices to change some more, and then I'll get something nicer.

FWIW, that Athlon and either 256 or 512 meg DDR SDRAM and a GF2 Ultra will run AH extremely well.  IMO, don't get a different vid card just for AH unless you really can't stand sparkly terrain textures or the tiny jagged edges you'll see at 1600x1200

[beet1e]

Thanks for the tips - you guys are the best.

I may well do this upgrade, but I don't think I'm going to do it right now. At the moment, that upgrade is not a sufficiently big step up from what I currently have, given that new Athlon processors are in the pipeline, and also new GeForce4 and ATI video cards. I have very smooth AH gameplay most of the time, with a frame rate of at least 45 and sometimes as high as 70, using 1280x1024 resoulution. (Higher resolution would make the objects on my 19" monitor too small) I feel that upgrading now might not make that much difference and may prove disappointing.

Bloom25 - I agree about the manual reading. That's one of the reasons I like Asus - all their manuals are out there in .PDF Adobe Acrobat format. My girlfriend, Tomato, upgraded to the A7V333, and is very pleased with it. She just installed it, and Windows detected a whole load of different devices, and all was well - no need to reinstall Windows. By the way, on the Scan website, the Athlon 2200 comes supplied with its own cooler - copper based, I believe.

So, no major upgrade for 6 months? But what I might just do is buy another 256MB of RAM. I can get that for loose change. I'm running a 1.2GHz Athlon with 100MHz SDRAM (clock multiplier = 12, ie NOT overclocked). And those memory sticks are at giveaway prices now.

[hardcase]

I have an Asus A7V333 with 1 gig of 333 mhz  memory.

if you use 3 dimms of ddr on that mobo it defaults to 266 mhz..

DDR..latches a bit on the upswing of the voltage AND the drop off.
SDRAM uses only the single latch during a clk cycle.

If you use 3 dimms of ddr, it will run 333mhz automatically.

hardcase