1.33 GHz, which chipset is best?

[Furie]

I am looking to build a machine ASAP and I'm trying my best to understand all the different options. I understand that there are three different chipsets: AMD 760, ALi MAGiK1, and VIA KT133A. From a review on Anandtech today, the AMD 760 is suppose to be the fastest. Tom's Hardware also recommended the AMD 760 about a week ago as a more stable and better developed chipset.
Anybody here have any thoughts on which one is best?

Thanks for the help,
Furie

[Fiz]

The most popular one is the KT133A, I would go with that one in case you do happen to run into some trouble, there will be more people able to give you a hand with it. I have the ABIT KT7A-RAID, it's a great overclocking board and I have no complaints about it. Its pretty cheap too, only $150 at newegg.com. It also has 4 fan headrers on it that can each supply about 6 watts to your fans, a big plus in my book. Plus, the drivers for the KT133A chipset are updated alot so you will always have good stuff. I would definitely say go with the KT133A, but you should read around and see what you think is best. :)

[proze]

the whole ddr-based board vs. sdram-based board thing is quite an issue at the moment. at the moment, most people have kt133 or kt133a boards cos no-one felt like buying ddr until pc2100 was released and reasonably priced. now it is, so this is an issue. personally, i'd still go with a kt133a based board like the abit kt7a-raid or epox 8kta3+, but in the end it's up to you. ddr does not give much of a performance increase at present, and is still more expensive overall.

[Tachyon]

Furie (Apr 05, 2001 12:53 p.m.):
I am looking to build a machine ASAP and I'm trying my best to understand all the different options. I understand that there are three different chipsets: AMD 760, ALi MAGiK1, and VIA KT133A. From a review on Anandtech today, the AMD 760 is suppose to be the fastest. Tom's Hardware also recommended the AMD 760 about a week ago as a more stable and better developed chipset.
Anybody here have any thoughts on which one is best?

Thanks for the help,
Furie

Take a look at Ed's article on the main page that he put up today.

Terry

[proze]

regarding the whole ddr/sdram battle.. ed has a cool article up on the frontpage about this.. i suggest you give it a read.

[Aftershock]

regarding ed's article


DDR ram is HELLA cheap now. Almost the SAME price as SDRAM, ~ $5 or so more from crucial.com thats for a 256 PC2100

so you really have 2 choices
SDRAM or DDR

I too am buildng a new comp in 3-4 weeks (1.33 also)
I have decided to go DDR, why? Right now for games, limiting factor is video card.....that might all change w/ a GeForce 3 down the line. With DDR so cheap there's no reason not to go for it. At WORSE it will be the same performace.

so you were right about the 3 chipsets for DDR Ali just sucks, AMD's 761's seem to be dam fast, HOWEVER, the current mobo's that are 761 have some oc'ing issues, as you cannot change clock multiplier or something along the sort.

Via's DDR chipset matches and even exceeds AMD 761 on some parts, and has more features. I think the MSI K7T266 Pro might be the best (based off VIA's)

check the thread I started about 1.33 SDRAM or DDR


so to sum it all up
if you go DDR (no reason not to if you are starting from scratch), go VIA's DDR chipset

MSI K7T266 Pro is the best VIA maybe the only...If you can wait around a month, I hear IwillKT266 (VIA chipset) will come out.

[Danny]

I went for an Asus A7M266 with AMD760 and 256MB of Crucial PC2100 (97$). Doesn't currently support multiplier ajustment, but Asus says it will in the next BIOS. (A gamble I now.) In any case the RAM should hit 300MHz giving me 1.5GHz, and from what I gather that's about what I can expect from an air cooled 1.33GHz Tbird.

[Aftershock]

I thought Asus said somewhere that they WERE NOT going to allow multiplier changes...well keep us (me) updated on this, if it does then I may go ASUS over MSI.

[Kriegster]

actually the kt266 chipset (ddr memory) is starting to look promising if you can afford to wait a little longer. Supposedly the memory benchmarks are getting up to amd760 levels. I too think the kt133a is the way to go (kk266 or kt7a) if you run it at 160+ fsb but I will probably change my mind when ddr boards get their memory scores up and come with all the overclocking bells and whistles that some of the kt133a's have now :)

[Aftershock]

That is true, AMD has been known to ditch their mobo chipsets in the past, and they plan to do the same with the 761 chips so I've heard.

KT266 chipset even outperforms the 761 slightly, HOWEVER I do not know much about MSI's products. I DO know that abit and asus make solid products.

Thats a toughy

[Furie]

Thanks for all the input guys. I decided to go with the MSI board. On the forums over at sharkyextreme lots of people seem to have faith in the MSI namebrand and it sounded like the best choice for a DDR solution right now.

Thanks again,
Furie

[Nagorak]

There's still one major reason to NOT go with DDR and that's because the DDR motherboards are much more inconvenient to overclock with. Basically you're stuck to FSB only, and FSB can only bring you so far. This might be OK if you have a 1 GHz (10*100) or 1.33 GHz (10*133) AXIA, but if your AXIA is already coded for 13x multiplier you are screwed. Even if the chip goes all the way to 1500 you'll stil only be running at like 115 FSB. I'd suggest going KT133a for the multiplier adjustments feature. It really is a great help!

[Nagorak]

Aftershock (Apr 06, 2001 07:23 p.m.):
That is true, AMD has been known to ditch their mobo chipsets in the past, and they plan to do the same with the 761 chips so I've heard.

KT266 chipset even outperforms the 761 slightly, HOWEVER I do not know much about MSI's products. I DO know that abit and asus make solid products.

Thats a toughy

It sucks that AMD doesn't put more into developing chipsets. IMO it made sense for the K6 to rely on other companies to develop chipsets because, frankly, the K6 sucked and couldn't get much worse. Now with the Athlon processors, the crappy quality VIA chipsets are really holding back their performance. AMD 761 was a good first start, and my guess is if they had allowed for four-way memory interleaving the AMD 761 performance would blow the VIA KT266 chipset out of the water.

I guess maybe when you're developing CPUs, motherboard chipsets are just a piece of cake in comparison. Either way, Intel develops its own chipsets and VIA has never managed to produce a better performing motherboard chipset. I think if AMD got serious, VIA couldn't come close to matching them either. I for one wish AMD WOULD get serious and forget relying on VIA and other worse companies like SIS and ALi. No offense to any of them, I'm sure their engineers know more about this kind of stuff than I ever will, but AMD and Intel just seem to have better engineers who can turn out better quality stuff.

In the long run I see this reliance on third party chipsets as a potential source of problems for AMD.