Help PLease

[TheGhoul]

I plan to go with an AMD chip, what I do not know yet. I have piii 700 now. Are there any socket A motherboards by MSI that use DDR ram but also allow pc133 till I buy the ddr ram?? Kinda new to this. I have been looking at MSI K7T Limited Edition and a Duron 800 or 900 would this be decent?

The ghoul

 

[JML]

I believe that no, there are no boards that can interchange w/ sdram/ddr. My bro has a duron 900 @ 963 (heh, his board isn't really up to snuff in the overclocking department). Runs dandy. As far as the MSI K7T Limited Edition, this board will go up to 166FSB, which is cool. BTW- your duron runs at a 100mhz FSB, so enabling the 133FSB on this board will overclock your cpu, so be prepared, a friend of mine killed his Tbird 1ghz (100mhz fsb) when he accidently set his board to 133.

 

[DuronManiac]

You could either go with these four solutions, either choose a board with the VIA KT133A (SDRAM) chipset, or go with a motherboard that has the AMD 761, ALi Magik 1, or the VIA KT266 chipsets (DDR).

The KT133A chipset allows a person to use the new 266MHz FSB AXIA/AJYHA Palamino T-bird CPU's with standard PC133 SDRAM, for a cheaper cost then DDR based boards, minus a 15-25% performance decrease.

On this choice, I recommend the K7T Turbo Series by MSI. MSI has come out close to the top with these mainboards, and they are worth less then the ABIT KT7A and the Asus A7V133, and don't have mind numbing problems with PCI and AGP issues such as those two do.

The AMD 761 only allows the use of 266MHz FSB T-Bird's with PC2100 (266 MHz) or PC1600 (200MHz) memory, hence full DDR RAM support. The AMD 761 does not support SDRAM so you can rule out the use of PC133/100 in these chipset based boards like the A7M266 by Asus. BTW: The Asus A7M266 comes with the AMD 761 DDR chipset.

The ALi Magik 1 is the competitor to the AMD 761, however in benchmark tests, it couldn't pull ahead of the VIA KT133A (SDR) in anything except benchmark scores. If you feel up to it, the Asus A7A266 is ALi equipped and can support both PC100/133 SDRAM and PC1600/2100 DDR RAM.
Note: The Swiftech MC462A CPU heatsink cannot fit on this mainboard at this time.

The KT266 chipset is a newcomer to the DDR world, yet it also can't beat the KT133A baby brother. An example of a KT266 board would the MSI K7T Master, and it does not support PC100/PC133 SDRAM.

Hope that answers your questions.

 

[DuronManiac]

When I was talking about benchmarks, those were memory benchmarks, where the DDR could beat the SDR.