Bjorn: Anyone, please give me a hint how the 200/266 diff in FSB frequency affects the system performance. How's the memory bandwidth affected?
Ok, a couple of additions to what the other guys have said:
One thing that's important to remember is that memory (bus) frequency and FSB frequency should be matched. That is, if you use 2x100 (which is what the 200MHz FSB is), the ideal motherboard would use either PC100 memory or PC1600 memory (the latter of which runs at 2x100MHz, the former at 1x100MHz).
Because PC133 memory is one of the "check list items" that OEMs just need to have, the ideal motherboard doesn't exist for PC100 memory. AMD's original Athlon chipset (AMD750) was ideal, in the sense used here, but was overall not quite as fast as the competition - and more expensive.
Luckily, VIA just introduced the ideal motherboard for PC133 memory: the KT133A (where the "A" is very significant!).
In the DDRSDRAM realm, there are a couple of "ideal" solutions. Right now, the main ones seem to be AMD's 760 and VIA's KT266.
The latter has gotten very mixed reviews, but this is apparently because of some problems with the initial boards and shouldn't be an issue (for long?). In any event, I would make sure to check some reviews before committing to a KT266-based motherboard.
Both chipsets should be matched with PC2100 (266MHz) DDRSDRAM when using the 266MHz bus.
One last note: Never sacrifice frequency for latency! For example, CAS2 PC100 performs virtually identical to CAS3 PC133. You really need to get CAS2 PC133 to get the performance increase. The same goes for PC1600 and PC2100.
(CAS is, simply put, an expression of the memory's latency - lower is better).
-fyo |
