motherboard upgrade

[smitty]

Hi. I am planning to upgrade my motherboard
and cpu. I'm using a Chaintech w/PIII500
It works very well however I wanted to get a faster bus speed and bump up cpu speed.I did a search of MB topics and it seems there is not much new discussion.Has anything changed?I have heard major problems w 820 chipsets?
Is the p3b-f a good choice?
Thanks for the input.
smitty

[Dr Mordrid]

The P3B-F is a very good choice for Intel processors. I have two now and they are running great.

What's interesting about the P3B-F is that it's a fast puppy. Toms Hardware mounted some 133mhz memory to one with a slightly O/C'ed PIII and it outperformed a dual channel RAMBUS equipped board. Not too shabby.

What you may want to do, however, is to wait for the new AMD Duron and Thunderbird processors and the boards that will go with them (SocketA).

The Duron will be priced at Celeron price points but deliver Athlon level performance. The Thunderbird has evolved the Athlon to an on-die full speed cache for even more performance.

There are articles on the new AMD processors and boards at http://www.anandtech.com .

Dr. Mordrid



[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 13 June 2000).]

[CrispuloV]

Most of the new mobos based on the VIA 694X chipset already compare favorably with the old BX boards of which the P3BF is one. ASUS has the P3V4X which is said to be very fast and stable, I have built a computer based on SOYO 7VCA though this is a S370 board. the Slot 1 counterpart is called the 6VCA. Overclockers.com also raves on the new IWill 694X board. The thing about this chipset is the ability to run the memory faster than the processor bus (if your memory can take it), also it has a 1/2 AGP divider so if you wish to run your P3-500 at 133 mhz you can set your AGP to the standard 66 mhz.