I'm still looking for a motherboard, and the industry seems to be in flux.

At first I was going to get a motherboard based on the 440BX chipset -
probably an ASUS or AOpen. Then I read reviews online that said that the
440BX standard is getting old and creaky. Since my building project is one
which is going to go on for some months and involve several people I decided
to look for the new technology.

This appeared to be Intel's i820 chipset. But when I read some reviews of
boards they usually said that the i820 chipset performed little better than
the 440BX chipset, unless one used Rambus (RIMMs), the new memory sticks.
When I priced these in my local shop it turned out that they cost some
$1,100 per 128MB stick of memory.

No Thank You.

Even for millionaires, the reviews were suggesting that it would be better
to wait for the i840 chipset, Intel's next generation, which is said to be
in the making, though nobody seemed sure that it would be released for
ordinary users.

Someone has suggested the VIA chipset as a compromise; a non-Intel chipset,
but he said that I could use an Intel processor with a board using the VIA
chipset. He suggested a K-7 processor. So I'm starting back into a new stage
of reading reviews.

Is there any real compromise here? Is the VIA chipset the current state of
the art? Is Rambus going to come down to a realistic price at any stage
soon?

                Curious about the people moderating your
                   messages? Visit our staff web site:
                     http://nospin.com/pc/staff.html