About FSB...

[Gil-galad]

Hi all, I've got a question concerning hardware upgrade related with FSB.

I have an Athlon Thunderbird @ 1400 MhZ 266 MhZ FSB, an Abit Motherboard with chipset VIA KT133 and 192 MB of 133 SDRAM.

I want to do an Hardware upgrade without spending alot of money. My main question is: do you think that the system performances are heavily influenced by the chipset's FSB (133 MhZ) which slows down the processor's FSB (266 MhZ) ??

Do you think that if I buy a motherboard with a chipset featuring a 266, 300, 333 or even 400 MhZ FSB and buy 512 MB of DDR RAM and keep the original processor I can get a significant performance boost?

Thanks a lot

[Darthtanion]

No, you won't get a significant boost in performance as your processor will be holding you back. I would, however, recommend going ahead and looking into a 400MHz motherboard (nForce2 is the only thing to look at in this category) and some good DDR memory. This will have you set up for a future processor upgrade already.

One thing to consider about the T-Bird 1400... it was the highest speed available on that particular core. It is nearly maxed out already in terms of performance and usually won't overclock well. But the DDR will still give you a boost in performance, just not the mind numbing speed that a new processor would give you.

And finally, don't get a new processor without getting a new board and memory. The processor speed would be a good speed increase, but the rest of your current hardware would cause drastic bottlenecks and you would be choking a good processor.

[Morgan_Lander]

Agreed. That CPU isn't the best any more, but it's no slouch either.

[wayout44]

Originally Posted by Gil-galad

Hi all, I've got a question concerning hardware upgrade related with FSB.

I have an Athlon Thunderbird @ 1400 MhZ 266 MhZ FSB, an Abit Motherboard with chipset VIA KT133 and 192 MB of 133 SDRAM.

I want to do an Hardware upgrade without spending alot of money. My main question is: do you think that the system performances are heavily influenced by the chipset's FSB (133 MhZ) which slows down the processor's FSB (266 MhZ) ??

Do you think that if I buy a motherboard with a chipset featuring a 266, 300, 333 or even 400 MhZ FSB and buy 512 MB of DDR RAM and keep the original processor I can get a significant performance boost?

Thanks a lot

Your processor's FSB is 133MHz and with double data rate factored in it's 266DDR but by getting a newer mainboard that runs DDR memory you will notice better performance as the SDRAM that you're running atm can only supply half the bandwidth that your processor is capable of.

[Frenchy2k1]

to give you an idea of the improvement you could get:
http://www.tomshardware.com/motherbo...athlon-03.html

this article show the difference in changing the platform for athlon. Your proc is a bit less powerful, but the results should scale.