Dean Kukral wrote:

> I am thinking about replacing my motherboard and
> have done some research.  (Tom's Hardware Guide,
> arstechnica, and Nospin.)  I am not sure how to
> interpret some of what I have seen.  They seem to
> say that the BX chipset with 100 memory is as fast
> as or faster than the Via chipset with 133 memory.
> (In other words, the BX chipset is much better.)
> Yet, they also seem to say the opposite.  Confusing
> things more, they sometime overclock the stuff to
> use in their comparisons.  (I am NOT interested in
> overclocking.)  The difference in price in the memory
> is small, but I would like to get the better performing
> motherboard.  Has anybody read more benchmark
> comparisons on these that would shed any light?
> (I am currently considering the ASUS P3V4X as
> top slot one candidate with a 667EB cpu.)

there is confusing, the base line is: BX chipset can be overclocked to
133 and beat VIA KX133A chip, Intel expensive chip. The only problem to
overclock BX is AGP speed, it has to run an 87Mhz, that's a problem with
some graphics card. If you don't want to overclock BX, then KX133A is
the best price/performance chip, it is much cheaper to get a KX133A mobo
and you'll save huge $ to avoid RDRAM instead by using PC133 SDRAM, the
performance is good enough to compare with Intel RDRAM solution. The
most important message is: whatever you do, DO NOT use Intel i820 with
PC100 SDRAM, it is the slowest; and i820 with PC600/700 RDRAM is no
better than KX133A with PC133 SDRAM, but you'll have to pay way too much
for it.

There is a complete long "history" of article on www.tomshardware.com
about RDRAM vs SDRAM, BX vs KX133 vs i820 vs i840
you need to read them all, then you'll know the difference between
different solutions.

My advise to research on Internet is: you have to find trusted site
rather than some guys who make money from big companies by doing what
Big Guys asked for. There are at least few places you can trust,
tomshardware is one of them. I have seen a lot of review sites which
provide fake/wrong info, some of them didn't mean to, they just did NOT
do job properly, some of them I will not make any common (but I really
want to know who is behind them).

eg. I'm in Australia, we have a "leading PC magazine" which provided
wrong tech info, at the time they published "misleading issues", those
issues were already proved wrong (one of the issue is well know for tech
person, but not for general public, another issue is 200% misleading - <
they know it, but they just did it for purpose >). So I terminated my
sub with them (just could not trust them anymore).

Jun Qian

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