New System
 

Hey,

I have been planning on building a new system, and I was going to make it an AMD system. I was browsing around trying to find what I was going to get, and I found that no AMD Motherboards are DDR2 compatible, so I searched this on Google and found an article that said AMD has no plans od DDR2 support. This is putting me in a difficult situation, becuase I want a 64 bit system so that I can use XP 64 and Windows Vista when it comes out, but I don't want to wait on a system that can use DDR3 like AMD is planning, because that is going to take at least a year and a half. The other problem is that the Xeon is the only 64 bit processor from Intel, and no Xeon Motherboards support DDR2. So currently my choices are a 32 bit system with DDR2 or a 64 bit system with DDR, or I could not build this system at all. I have been looking at an AMD system with SLI. My current system is a Pentium 4 3.2 with Hyper Threading (478 unfortunately) with 1 Gig of PC4000 Corsair XMS, a GeForce 6800 Ultra (AGP 8x) and a Chaintech Zenith 9CJS Motherboard, Running Windows XP Pro with SP2. I have also heard that DDR2 has had problems, so I was wondering if it is worth it at all. And also, does Intel durrently support SLI? Please just give me your opinion on what I should do. The primary use for the new system would be gaming and media.

Thanks,
Victorious25

why do you want a system with DDR2 ? it has not proven any faster then DDR1, there is a reason AMD is not interested in DDR2 :)

I thought an (overclocked?) intel system did benefit from ddr2?...

nope, DDR1 running with low timings at DDR500+ speeds will give the P4 all the bandwidth it needs:)

Thanks for the input jmke, that is exactly what I wanted to know. YYou cleared everything up for me. I am going to make an AMD system with no doubts now.

Thanks again,

Victorious25

stick with lower timed PC3200 vs relax timed PC4xxx memory
the A64 can succesfully use a FSB:MEM divider which does not affect performance in a bad(large) way.

if you have to chose between 512Mb FAST memory or 1GB "slower", go for the second

dual channel is not "needed" for the A64, the S939 does support dual channel, but the difference with single channel is minimal.