Motherboard advice

[Uncle Jasper]

First of all, thanks Chopper, for such great information on RAID! It was very clear and informative, plus it answered one of my questions already.

Anyway, as a gamer, I'm assisting a friend (and fellow gamer) of mine who's purchasing a new motherboard. He's tied between ASUS's P4S8X and the P4T533-RAID. The differences (which I'll discuss below) are beyond my technical expertise, particularly the main benefits of the major ones. I'll try to be brief and discuss only what we feel is most important . . .

In short, is AGP8X support (in the P48SX) or RAMBUS support (in the P4T533-R) going to get the most performance increase in gaming? My RAID question has already been answered, thanks to Chopper.

If you were/are a gamer, what board do you feel offers the most benefits, and/or is one clearly superior? (BTW, he's getting a P4 2.53 processor with either).

Thanks in advance for any support.

J

 

[Ecniv]

First of all, RAMBUS is crap, Intel didnt take long before they realized that DDR was the way to go. AGP 8x? well its true power is yet to be seen. And I doubt it will be miraculous, but it will be a good benefit to a gamer.

If you were/are a gamer, what card do you feel offers the most benefits, and/or is one clearly superior? (BTW, he's getting a P4 2.53 processor with either).

Here I'mnot sure what card your talking about. If you mean which Motherboard, Id go with the ASUS. If your talking Video Cards, My suggestion is the MSI Geforce 4 Ti 4600

 

[Martin]

As usual, RDRAM ain't gonna make too much of a real-world difference. Optimizations are still a bit ways out - about a year and a half back, the AMD Athlon 1.2 GHz with 'puny' little PC133 SDRAM outperformed a P4 1.5 GHz with PC800 RDRAM in many real-world tests. AGP 8x would probably prove to be a greater treasure to professionals who work primarily with modeling; aka dealing with many polygons on screen at once. The AGP 8x mobo now would obviously be a better choice, providing a feature used on more graphics cards in the future - though AGP 4x didn't see much of a big step towards AGP 2x. It can be your choice there.

As ecniv pointed out above, a GF4 Ti 4600 graphics card is good if you can afford it - getting pretty cheap now, and spend extra for a R9700 if you really need the power... and I mean REALLY.