anyone used this motherboard before

[vulcanman09]

here`s the linky.
http:/www.partspc.com/store/product4704.html
as i will be selling my k7d master l
ive found pentium 3 tualitan 1.26 ghz procs for 119.00 cdn a piece
this mobo uses the intel i840 rambus chipset
any info would be greatly appreciated
david
:attn: :attn: :attn: :attn:

[disk11]

It doesn't look like it will take tualatins, and RDRAM is expensive.

You know that MPs blow P3-Ss away right? I would highly recommend against doing this downgrade.

[vulcanman09]

actually with intel inf chipset drivers for xp
and the memory bandwith that rambus supports
there is no downgrade
with dual pentium 3 s`s and rambus that motherboard screams
i read several months about someone using the
850e chipset drivers on his i840 mobo
the memory bandwith far excedded that of the amd mobo
unfornuately i cannot remember that website or the page
if the motherboard lists it as intel 8.4 vrm specs
the it is tualitan capable
it just depends if the mobo has enough multipliers
programmed in the bios
and rambus here in canada is pretty cheap compared
to the u.s

[rezon8]

if i remember correctly, PIII's max out at a little over 1Ghz, and i am currently running two MP's @2Ghz a piece, i agree with vulcanman09 that the Memory bandwidth of the K7D is not very fast, but i would like to know what applications you would use that would benefit from having the extra memory speed from Rambus while having a MAJOR reduction in CPU speed, i mean would you still have faster performance with the PIII/Rambus setup than the MP/pc2100 setup? I'll be the first to say that the mem speed on my k7d is slow, and i have it pushed to a fsb of 150 and al of the mem timings are maxed out, but i find it hard to believe that the memory speed advantage you would get from Rambus, would somehow overcome the 1Ghz drop in processor speed, not to mention the architechure differences that the Athlon has to its advantage as well,

Rendering? server I\O? what would you use it for??

[cmcquistion]

PIII bandwidth is not going to surpass the bandwidth available from the DDR-based 760MPX. The 760MPX isn't a screamer chipset, but PIII's weren't designed to take advantage of anything over SDRAM bandwidth. You can get PIII boards that take DDR or RDRAM, but their actual bandwidth will be lower than the DDR bandwidth of your AMD dually.

[vulcanman09]

actually from all that i have read about the pentium3`s
intel was losing the battle against AMD big time
so intel retooled their fabs.
and thus the pentium 3 tualitans were born
intel added more pipelines and shrunk the die down the to 13 microns
not to mention , made them to take full advantage of drr ram
even more so from rambus i.e. i 820 chipset
yes the i 820 chipset was garbage ( even intel admitted it. )
so they went back to the drawing board
thus the i 840 chipset totally revamped rambus memory
controller.
unfortunately there was no operating system programmed
to force the proc/memory/chipset to operate at it`s
designed operating frequency
windows 98/se not a chance ( always crashing )
windows me ( pathetic o.s. )
windows me ( very buggie )
windows xp pro ( redone from the ground up )
plus it`s programmed to use both procs if it needs to.
i am no programming expert.
but i read alot from the web and i keep well informed
david

[cmcquistion]

The Pentium 3 wasn't designed for DDR. It wasn't designed to send two signals per clock (double-pumping). AMD's socket 462 chips (Duron, Athlon, Athlon XP, etc.) were designed to send two signals per clock (double pumped), which is why they can effectively use all of DDR's bandwidth, while the Pentium 3 cannot. There are Pentium 3 chipsets that support DDR or RDRAM, but just because it has a chipset, doesn't mean that it can effectively use the theoretical bandwidth of that RAM.

When Intel designed the Pentium 4, they realized that their FSB/memory design of the P3 was strangling its performance, somewhat, so they designed the P4 to be quad-pumped. The first P4's effective FSB was 400 MHz, which was enough to saturate dual channel DDR or single channel RDRAM, at the time. Of course, Intel has upped the FSB, since then, but their quad pumped FSB has remained the same.

Here (http://www20.tomshardware.com/motherboard/20010124/index.html) is just one comparison between PIII SDRAM and DDR chipsets. I had to go digging to find this, since the whole P3 DDR vs SDRAM debate is a really old debate. The results showed that the DDR solution never beat the SDRAM solution by more than 1%.

Here is a snippet from their conclusion:

We shouldn't be too disappointed by the results we saw, although they show that there is hardly any justification for an upgrade from a PC133-platform to a DDR-platform for Pentium III. In fact, there is hardly any sensible justification for the purchase of a Pentium III processor in the first place anymore, because today AMD's Athlon processors outperform Pentium III at a significantly lower price point. This means that upgrading a Pentium III system on a budget can only lead to the conclusion to switch over to an AMD-platform.

Pentium III was unable to take advantage of RDRAM and thus it hardly gains any performance with DDR-SDRAM as well. Instead of telling you that it would make sense to rather buy Pentium III plus Apollo Pro 266 and DDR memory once it meets the same price points as i815 and PC133 memory, I'd suggest to forget about getting a new Pentium III processor altogether. If you want excellent performance at a good price it's close to impossible getting around buying an AMD Athlon system.