Is my mobo a bottleneck?

[weshuang]

I just recently upgraded a CPU without changing the mobo. I now have an Ahtlon XP 1700 Tbred B, running on a Biostar 7VKD, which is an SDRAM, 266 mhz FSB mobo. I have the chip OC'd to about 1.6 ghz right now.

My question is, how much of a performance increase would I notice if I bought a new mobo that uses DDR RAM? If I were to buy a new mobo, which brands or even specific models would you recommend I look into?

 

[WhiteWizard]

Since your machinne is up and working, I'll sugest waiting for an nforce2 drop in price, the memory is allready cheap, one the mainboards cost over $90, you can sell yours and buy one. Diference is speed?, it depens, but you can spect a 20 or 25% increase without changing the hard disk form a faster one.

 

[weshuang]

OK, so if I understand you correctly (always a problem for me ), nforce2 is a good mobo brand for OC'ing?

 

[caboob]

The nForce2 is the best AMD chipset at the moment but the best overclocking mobo brand is the Epox 8RDA+. But you cant go wrong with an Asus A7N8X either.

 

[mechBgon]

Wait a minute, we want the price even lower now? It's already gone from ~$135 to $99 for the 8RDA+, and I'm not going to reel off the full list of features (again) but it offers a darn lot for $100.

Will you notice the difference? It is going to depend partly on your hard drive. The fastest motherboard in the world still waits at the same speed, when your hard drive is holding up the show, so don't expect miracles It can't make your video card faster than it is, either. In memory-intensive operations you would probably be able to tell the difference the most.

 

[weshuang]

What's faster, SCSI hard drives, or the Ultra ATA drives? I assume the SCSI drives are, and I've been seeing some pretty cheap used ones. I also have, don't ask me why, a SCSI burner and CD-ROM.

 

[BarryAZ]

Well, in theory, a good SCSI controller and top notch SCSI Drive will readily outperform the current best ATA drives -- some trade offs:

Cost -- ATA drives are a lot cheaper as you move toward the upper end (ie 80G and up) relative to SCSI.

Capacity -- the best price point for SCSI drives is 36G 15K (which is going to perform VERY well indeed) -- as you go to 72G the cost soars and it is harder to track down the 15K drives.

Now if you were running a server, SCSI would be the way to go, in large part because the way a SCSI controller/drive combination offloads CPU traffic from the primary CPU, and also because the SCSI controller/drive combination is much more efficient at handling multiple concurrent read/write requests (as in network use).

I use a 40G ATA-100 drive internal, and an 18G SCSI 10K U2W (80M/Second) drive externally. The real reason for the SCSI drive -- easier for me to swap to another computer downstream (it has my support images and music). Also, that external SCSI drive is set to be shared out in the home network (the Music is available to any computer in the home office).

One other payoff with the SCSI drives -- you can not only go external (because the cabling support allows for longer and external chains), but also you can chain many more drives). And because it is external, you don't have a power drain or heat build up in the case. Those 15K SCSI drives do run rather warm.