Ok I'm a bit of a dunce

[UrganNagru]

I'm trying to gradually up grade my computer as I can't do it in one go as my only source of money is a paper round and I haven't got the patience to save up for longer than 3 months to get the whole lot done.
One of the the things I want is some faster and larger memory but Í'm not sure if DDR 400 is the fastest DDR memory. Also I have an AMD athlon 1700xp which uses a socket A, so I'm wondering if it will work in another Socket A which is faster (like the 333 mhz).
So basically can anyone suggest a new mainboard that will take the fastest RAM and Socket A chip, oh and has and AGP2.0 port as well
Thanks for any help

 

[Shovel]

The wonderful thing with AMDs Socket A parts is that the latest Socket A motherboard will take the oldest Socket A chip. So yes, you can buy yourself a shiny new nForce 2 board and drop the old CPU in.

Some things to take account of: If your CPU is a 266Mhz part, you will likely get better performance with 266Mhz DDR than 333Mhz due to syncronising the CPU and RAM. I don't know if this remains true at DDR 400Mhz, with the increased speed again.

If you want to upgrade the CPU later, and with money being tight, I'd suggest getting DDR400 in one go and getting the faster CPU later. The top end 3200+ is dropping in price as the newer Athlon 64s come down. Anyone should be able to pick one of them up by the end of the summer, hopefully.

Personal recommendation on a budget: Asus A7N8X-X. < £50. Wont give you RAID or Firewire, but it's your call if you want that (add £30 for the deluxe version with Firewire and nobs on).

It will, of course, take your current 266Mhz DDR (or whatever speed you have).

 

[UrganNagru]

That is fantastic mate exactly the kind of thing I was looking for, just out of curiosity what is RAID and firewire?
Oh, and thanks

 

[Mr.Monkey3]

If you are short of cash, don't worry about raid or firewire

Have a butchers in google. Lots of info there.

 

[fatbusinessman]

RAID = Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks.

Basically allows you to take two hard disks and munge them into either one double-size, double-speed (ish) disk, or one extra-reliable disk. For your purposes, unlikely to be any use.

FireWire

Somewhat like USB, only generally held to be faster (even than USB 2 devices). Generally used for high-bandwidth devices such as video cameras and iPods. Again, unlikely to be any use, but most new motherboards tend to have a FireWire port or two.

 

[SawTooTH]

The wonderful thing with AMDs Socket A parts is that the latest Socket A motherboard will take the oldest Socket A chip. So yes, you can buy yourself a shiny new nForce 2 board and drop the old CPU in.

Some things to take account of: If your CPU is a 266Mhz part, you will likely get better performance with 266Mhz DDR than 333Mhz due to syncronising the CPU and RAM. I don't know if this remains true at DDR 400Mhz, with the increased speed again.

If you want to upgrade the CPU later, and with money being tight, I'd suggest getting DDR400 in one go and getting the faster CPU later. The top end 3200+ is dropping in price as the newer Athlon 64s come down. Anyone should be able to pick one of them up by the end of the summer, hopefully.

Personal recommendation on a budget: Asus A7N8X-X. < £50. Wont give you RAID or Firewire, but it's your call if you want that (add £30 for the deluxe version with Firewire and nobs on).

It will, of course, take your current 266Mhz DDR (or whatever speed you have).

Exactly what I did. I bought an nforce2 board and ran my XP2200 in that. On the DDR front you'll need to make sure you buy a good quality matched pair of RAM if you want to run the ram synchronously. I bought some Giel ultra fast ram for about 150 quid (1Gb from overclockers) and an XP3200 for 139 quid and now have it all running synchronously. I dont think the ram will run faster than the cpu clock but be aware that if you intend to go to a 3200 buy good ram. I had a bad experience with cheap unbranded.