Help me get something straight

[Dazman]

Im thinking about building a more up-to-date system

Term ata/ide 66/100/133 refers to bandwith (Data path)

So If I had a Athlon xp 1700 266fsb, would it it work on a MB which supports 66/100/133? Cause of the double data feature?

Would I have to buy a HDD that supports the 133mhz? or could i run a 100mhz drive for back-ward compatibility?

Same question with the ram it would be DDR so that would be fine again wouldn't it if the baord supports it.

Getting confused with the 133mhz, that is a feature on the motherboard but also comes in a vast array on Hard drives, ram, cpu???

Help I want to get a Gigabyte 7VTXE+ but want to use a fast HDD, FAST ram, and a possible Athlon XP

Please explain these terms in more detail....will there be settings in the bios to help it recognise what is 10omhx and what is 133mhz?

thanks

[saphalline]

You're actually talking about several busses here, and all of them are connected to different parts. They really don't have much to do with eachother in terms of the numbers used to describe them.

Starting with the hard drive, the ATA 66/100/133 refers to bandwidth, yes. Bandwidth is not speed, which is what MHz is. The ATA number is in MB per second, but it's really only a ceiling, a potential, a maximum transfer rate. You won't get this all the time, or even most of the time, with an ATA/133 hard drive. Still, going with a hard drive slower than ATA/133 is just plain stupid nowadays, especially if your mobo supports ATA/133.

Now for the CPU. An Athlon XP 1700+ (which operates at 1.47GHz) runs off a 133MHz DDR bus, which effectively makes it 266MHz. Just like the Pentium4 runs off a 100MHz quad-pumped bus making it effectively 400MHz. Of course, this is only the CPU bus speed, which can be run at a separate speed from the RAM.

The only RAM that is reasonable for the Athlon XP is DDR RAM. Obviously, you know that but just let me make my point here http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/wink.gif. The type of DDR RAM for your mobo in question (Gigabyte 7VTXE+) is PC2100, aka DDR266. Two numbers for the same RAM? Well, it does have "double" in "Double Date Rate". "PC2100" again refers to bandwidth -> 2100MB per second. "DDR266" refers to the speed of the RAM in MHz -> 266MHz. Oddly enough, that's the same as the CPU bus speed. As I said, the CPU bus speed and RAM speed don't have to match, but it's better if they do.

So the short answer to your new system question is yes. Go ahead and get the Gigabyte 7VTXE+, and you can put an ATA/133 hard drive with it (Maxtor is good), and PC2100/DDR266 RAM with it (at least 512MB of Crucial RAM, IMHO), and an Athlon XP at whatever speed you desire (the 1700+ has a nice price point right now, doesn't it?). You could also choose slower parts for any of those and they would still work... but why do that?


Oh yeah, about the BIOS part of the question. As long as you don't intend to overclock (never do that on a system's first boot), just choose Automatic whenever your BIOS gives you that option. Once you've got everything working and have loaded Windows, then you can go back and tweak things if you need to.
------------------
this space for rent

[This message has been edited by saphalline (edited 05-07-2002).]

[Dazman]

Thanks you for that info, it's pretty much what i thought, so you nicely summarised it for me to get it into order thanks!