On 10/28/05 12:43 pm Derek W. Keoughan tossed the following ingredients 
into the ever-growing pot of cybersoup:

>  >I need a new MB. I have a Gigabyte GA-7VAXP Ultra with an AMD Athlon XP
>  >2200+ and 2 GB of RAM. I like this setup. It is fast enough for me. I
>  >run eCS and rarely Win2K. I like the IDE, RAID and SATA controllers and
>  >real Serial and Parallel ports with lots of USB too. But it won't boot
>  >until it has warmed up for about 5 minutes because one or more drives
>  >fail to get recognized, and occasionally it hangs until I jiggle the
>  >drive cables. I need a new MB.
>  >
>  >Please, someone, express an opinion or give some advice. I could buy a
>  >replacement MB that would support my CPU and memory, or I could buy
>  >something more modern with a new CPU and memory. Would it be foolish not
>  >to do the full upgrade? Can anyone suggest MBs or Chip Sets to avoid for
>  >eCS?
> 
> What speed of RAM is your 2GB, and how is it configured... 4x512, or
> 2x1024?  You'll need to get a board with enough DIMM slots for it, if
> it's usable.  That Gigabyte board supports DDR400 in only two slots, so
> I'll assume you have 2x1024.
> 
> Socket A is dead, and even the newer Socket754 is dead-end... all
> current and future development on AMD is in Socket939...  which will
> allow you to upgrade to the new dual-core Athlon64's in the future.
> 
> The Tyan S2865 series features Broadcom LAN support that works with
> eCS, and ATI RAGE XL video support you can upgrade later - but for most
> people, it's more than enough, especially with eCS.  You won't be able
> to use your existing AGP card in this motherboard, but for 2D work, the
> RAGE XL should suffice.
> 
> http://www.tyan.com/products/html/tomcatk8e.html
> 
> It's available with or without audio and firewire and has 4 PCI slots
> for plugging in all your older cards, as required.
> 
> It's "latest and greatest", but if you buy into AGP or Socket A or
> Socket 754, you're cutting off your upgrade options in the future.
> 
> Of course, that means you'll also be buying a new CPU - if you're happy
> with your old one, there's a number of Socket A motherboards still
> available... you might be best off seeing if you can find an identical
> board, for greatest ease-of-implementation, since you're already set up
> on one.  Tried eBay if you can't find it locally?
> 
> Whatever you do - I'd recommend avoiding Intel architecture... it's a
> non-starter these days.  It's "already obsolete", and the
> price/performance ratio is poor... but I don't need to tell you this,
> really - you're already an AMD owner. :-D



I thought I had read somewhere recently -- on Tom's Harware or AnandTech 
-- that Intel's latest CPUs have overtaken AMD again.

But what about Opteron machines? Any known to work or not work with eCS SMP?

-=-
Alan


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