Queries About Motherboard

[Aakarshan.d]

hi there

I am seeing new motherboards been released all overevery month. Sometimes i feel i too have an old model thouog my motherboard is 6 months older only. My query is does technical things like motherboard bus speed and RAM speed are concerned with gaming? I have also noticed manier times that this topics are never covered at back of game cases.

My another query is how much motherboard bus speed matter? Also does motheboard make any difference in section such as gaming except the slot it contains?

Please help me regarding this problem

[Amd Athlon]

Chipsets matter more than anything on a mobo. Memory speeds/cpu fsb are dictated by the chip. As for AGP, Im sure it will still linger for quite some time. As for playing Crysis on AGP.....good luck, doubt it will play.

Games are mem hogs. Bf2 will play on 1gb but is not smooth. A simple upgrade to 2gb makes all the difference. A lot of games (online) require some sort of anti-cheat service running in the background which again requires a bit of memory. More the merrier unless your stuck in 32bit OS. Then around 3gb is the limit. If you are serious about building a gaming machine then pci-e is the only way to fly and since hardware is so ahead of software anymore, you can build a relativley cheap gaming rig. FP had a post on this not too long ago if Im not mistaken. I just rebuilt my rig and it cost me $500 but only got a mobo and vid card.

[gygabite]

A 333 or 400 FSB CPU will not run faster than 266 if at all. I don't
really recall that far back you simply can't dump data to/from
the CPU faster than the motherboard capabilities (don't forget memory
speed).

Now, that said, you can try to over clock the FSB to try a different
CPU. or overclock the AthlonXp 2100+. but to go from 266 FSB to 333 or
400 is quite a jump and will cause stability issues especially. with the
memory.

[Joshua]

Yes, but some games are more depended on CPU than others (and when I say "CPU" that takes in bus and RAM speed). Generally you need more CPU for single player because not only does the computer have to render the game, it needs to manage the AI.

Keep in mind while a GPU may be more important in a multiplayer game there is a WORLD of difference playing a game on Athlon64 4000+ versus an Intel Quad Core Q6600 with the same vid card (being that I made that migration myself, I can attest to that).

Most games are scalable. Crysis is not one of them. Many game will run fine on older PCs by scaling down the video quality.

Your system is woefully inadequate for bleeding edge gaming (and pretty much sucks for non-bleeding edge gaming). I looked up your specs (P4 2.4GHz). That's a 6 year old PC (Amazon was selling them in September 2002) with DDR1 RAM.

[Russell]

If you're going to get into gaming, you are probably going to be replacing components about every 2 to 3 years. You'll know when it's time to upgrade when you buy a new game and it barely runs or you have to turn down your resolution to even get it to run smoothly. When this time comes, you may not have to replace the entire rig. A better video card will do wonders but it can only do as much as it has the bandwidth from the motherboard to do.

My advice for you is to buy a nice case that is easy to get into. I've been using my case for almost 8 years and it's seen 4 motherboards. Buy a quality power supply. Don't get suckered in by high wattage. Do some research and get one that can support the video card and Motherboard you plan an running with it. Get your memory from Crucial. Their memory is the most compatible memory I've ever used.

As for the motherboard/video card, that's up to you. If it were me, I'd build an Intel I7 system. Intel, EVGA, and XfX all make good motherboards. For a video card, look into an EVGA or BFG NVIDIA card. Both of these companies carry lifetime warranties on their cards.

If you're wanting to run Direct-X 10 games in Direct-X 10, you're going to have to run Vista. What I've done is install Vista and XP on separate drives so I can still run some of my older hardware if I want. I simply select with drive I wish to boot to in the bios.