An excellent discussion about motherboards, HDD, Chipsets, CPU, etc.  you may
find on: 
<http://www.tomshardware.com/mainboard.html>http://www.tomshardware.com/mai
nboard.html 
which I consider as very reliable source.


Ayaz


At 11:40 AM 18-02-98 -0700, you wrote:
>At 07:33 AM 2/18/98 -0800, Bridgett Perry wrote:
>> Bob Wright replied:
>>
>>"You can get a good mid-level Pentium2 motherboard & a PII-233MMX chip
>>for around $500, (wholesale here in the USA).   This will give you AGP
>>support for your graphics card...  and there are a great many
>>AGP video cards available, they are the fastest thing available.
>>Be sure you get the 440LX AGP chipset on your motherboard."
>>
>>Like Lance, I will also be looking to build a system to be used with
>>graphics. Could you please tell me what AGP is.  Is the 440LX AGP
>>chipset uniquely good for graphics?  I was considering the TX chipset
>>but am not certain of the difference.
>>
>>Thanks for clarifying,
>>
>>Bridgett Perry
>
>
>AGP is Accellerated Graphics Port.  This is a new concept in the way
>a motherboard gives the graphics card access to the processor and
>the Ram memory.  This removes the bottle neck of moving graphics
>through the PCI bus and allows the graphics card direct access to
>the Pentium II chip / L2 cache and the system memory.  It can be
>as much as 12.5 frames per second faster than conventional PCI
>video cards.
>
>The AGP card has a special slot on the board.  This removes the
>video from the PCI bus to allow other devices in the PCI bus more
>bandwidth.  It speeds up the entire system.
>
>Cyrix and AMD have implemented new chips that are intended to
>stay in the Pentium or Socket 7 range, use an AGP port on the older style
>system Pentium boards and still move up to the 300mhz range.  The
>only problem is that the socket7 does not offer the DIB or Dual
>Independent Bus.  This DIB connects the processor to the L2 cache
>and the system bus, speeding up the whole system, including the
>graphics.   I notice that you can now buy Pentium motherboards with
>the AGP socket and support the 100mhz bus speeds.  I personally
>believe it is a mistake consider using a socket 7 motherboard with
>processor chips above 200mhz.   They are only going allow minimal
>use of the processor speed, although they will allow for "inexpensive"
>300mhz machines.  But, you get what you pay for...  *wink*
>
>My personal opinion about processor chips, 233mhz and above, is to
>go with the PentiumII chips.  It will allow for far better utilization of
>graphics speeds.
>
>Bob
>