Author: Tom Kerrigan
Date: 04:41:02 03/22/00
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On March 22, 2000 at 05:58:11, Francis Monkman wrote: >On March 21, 2000 at 21:27:23, chris sergel wrote: > >>Thank you both for your comments. >>I'm going to try this new "athlon" chip. >>I appreciate your time. >>Sincerely, > >I second the reservation about high-end graphics card(s). I got a Matrox G400 >for my Athlon 700, without realizing that the Athlon/Matrox combo is reputed to >be problematical, and have found it somewhat unstable. Apart from that, great. > >Francis Monkman I wasn't aware that Matroxes (Matroxi?) are unstable. I know for a fact that some AMD chipsets will not run AGP 4x correctly and must default to AGP 2x. This is often the case with boxed motherboards. OEMs (Gateway, Compaq, etc.) tend to get "good" chipsets which will run AGP 4x correctly. This issue has been discussed at Tom's Hardware. Tom is not extremely happy with AMD because they evidently tried to cover up this issue for some time. I'm not sure it's that big a deal, because in real life, the difference between 2x and 4x is only significant on synthetic benchmarks. Video cards seem somewhat problematic with non-Intel chipsets. I had a K6-2 a while ago, and a P5A motherboard which is supposed to be the best money can buy. It was totally unstable when I tried to use my TNT2 with it. Initially there were timing problems, which were solved with a BIOS update. After that, I still could not use it because of a totally bizarre problem that I am at a complete loss to explain. But this is the main reason why I bought my current (somewhat inferior) LX mobo. -Tom
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