On Thu, 2002-04-18 at 05:10, Baka Attila Tamás wrote: > Dear Tony, > > Thank you for your answer. I'm glad to hear you had no problems. Still I'd > like to know if anyone used the motherboard I described.... > > BAT
First: Never, ever buy a motherboard without researching motherboards on the net. I never buy a mobo that is not in a roundup review. Mobos are not like saltine crackers; you need to research before you buy. It's the single most important investment you will make in your box. There are several salient hardware sites to consider when you are looking for mainboard information. Some are amateurs, some are more professional. Be careful who you listen to; watch how they write; if it's bad writing, chances are the review will be amateurish and probably means that you are on a thumbsucker site. Absolutely ignore individual mainboard reviews; they are completely useless unless you are just interested in specific mainboard info AFTER having decided on a mainboard from a roundup review. I've been tracking mobos for a while and unfortunately I've never seen your particular brandname (FastFame8VTAA). As I said before, my rule of thumb is that if I can't get a mainboard to appear in a ROUNDUP (a roundup is a comparison of a group of mobos to each other) review of a particular mainboard, I don't even look at it. It's not worth the risk. Roundup reviews are rare. It's hard to find sites that have them. It's even harder to find *good* roundup reviews. There's a good reason for this, and it's money. It's extremely tough, time consuming, and costly to bring together that much hardware at one time without the help of the manufacturers, or a bank account set aside for that reason. That's why you will find sites like Sharkyextreme (which used to be a good site) crawling with useless single mobo reviews. If a veteran site like Sharky finds it difficult to support roundup reviews, you can bet startup sites just find it VERY tough to support decent roundup reviews. Some veteran sites found that they could not compete with the thorough, complete, and more professional evaluations by Tomshardware. Anandtech is another veteran site that attempts a thorough treatment of roundup reviews, keeping pace with Dr Tom as best they can. A good example of this is a recent roundup review of athlon mainboards based on the via kt266a: http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.html?i=1578&p=22 For another thorough treatment of the latest KT266A based Athlon mobos is on Tomshardware at this URL: http://www6.tomshardware.com/mainboard/01q4/011126/index.html One last item. Your first consideration with regard to benchmarks should be OpenGl benches; i.e., Quake 3 Arena benches. The reason is that no matter what your final purpose for the machine, there is nothing that shows the intrinsic value and power of the fpu, memory, and mainboard subsystems like a 3d world simulation test. The power of the CPU/mobo/memory team becomes rapidly and starkly apparent. With these tests, it is easy to see that the Athlon cpus have much more value per megahertz than the Pentium 4 cpus. The pentium 4's had a bunch of error handling and pipelining circuitry lobotomized out of their cores so that they could be OC's up to the 2.4 gigahertz levels they are currently at. You've made a good choice with your cpu decision, even if you were a bit hasty with the mobo. I say to P4 advocates, ignore the smoke and mirrors and look at the man behind the curtain; click your heels together three times and go home to Athlon. LX -- °°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°° Kernel 2.4.8-26mdk Mandrake Linux 8.1 Enlightenment 0.16.5 Evolution 1.02 Registered Linux User #268899 http://counter.li.org/ °°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°
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