Athlon/DDR mobos (was Re: What do you guys thing about the P4)

[Troy Baer]

On Wed, 4 Apr 2001, Robert G. Brown wrote:
> Speaking of DDR Athlons -- are there any motherboards that are actually
> available out there?  Most of what I was able to find in a modest
> websearch was VIA KT7 with ordinary SDRAM; the one or two vendors (e.g
> ASUS) with a DDR/Athlon motherboard listed said something about being
> currently unavailable.  Any recommendations or caveats?  I have grant
> money that must be spent, and if I cannot find DDR's right now I'll have
> to do ordinary SDRAM.

There are a couple uniproc Athlon/DDR motherboards that are available
right now if you look hard.  The most widely available ones are the
Gigabyte GA-7DX and the Biostar M7MIA.  I have one of the Biostar mobos in
a 1.2GHz Athlon system at home.

The major problem with DDR memory right now is finding DIMMs that are
stable at the 133MHz system bus speed.  Some batches of Nanya PC2100-rated
DDR RAM are very unstable (i.e. cause silent lockups) unless you downclock
them to 100MHz (PC1600), and I just sent back a stick of Samsung
PC2100-rated DDR RAM that had the same problem.  Unfortunately none of the
current crop of Athlon/DDR mobos have handle running the memory bus at
100MHz and the front side bus at 133MHz, so I was stuck running my 1.2GHz
Athlon at 900MHz to keep it up for more than about five minutes...

	--Troy
-- 
Troy Baer                       email:  troy at osc.edu
Science & Technology Support    phone:  614-292-9701
Ohio Supercomputer Center       web:  http://oscinfo.osc.edu