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Old April 17th 04, 04:59 AM
Wayne Wastier
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The Lord rebuke you. Satan is a liar, and the father of lies. He doesn't
have a sister. You are a fool to align yourself with the hater of all
mankind.



"Satan's Little Sister" wrote in message
...
Thus spake Tone-EQ:

I've been sitting here for an hour thinking about a new system, mainly
about
the best time to buy (never really a good time with computers though!).
I've
just read about socket "939". This May should bring with it the
announcement
of this new socket (a 940 with a pin removed to use non-ECC memory). I
want
an Athlon 64 FX, but after hearing about the 939 I'm gonna wait.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1985

Anyway, I want an Asus (or similar quality) socket 939 board with a Athlon
FX-53, with support for DDR2 (will that be possible with these
boards/processors at all), Gigabit LAN, PCI-Express (1x and 16x), 8x USB
2.0
ports, SATA RAID, while keeping all the IDE and floppy ports too. Oh, and
I'll of course be needing a PCI-X graphics card, anyone know of
developments
on that side of things?


Yeah, I've been waiting for the 939 boards, too. Like General
Schvantzkoph said in his post, the missing pin has nothing to do with
ECC memory. It's equal parts simplify the boards (four layer, instead
of six layer) and allow the use of unbuffered RAM, plus the vital
incompatibility with socket 940 (you don't want your server customers
buying cheaper consumer level chips, like with MP and XP).

As for DDR2, that will require changes to the CPU core as well as a
new motherboard. Right now DDR2 doesn't make sense for Ath64/Opterons.
With an integrated memory controller the smaller latencies of DDR are
better than the higher bandwidth of DDR2. I doubt there will be DDR2
Ath64s before next year.

A PCI-X graphics card? I think you're confusing PCI-E(xpress) and
PCI-X. PCI-X, found mainly in servers, is a 64 bit, 66/100/133 MHz
extension of the original 32 bit 33 MHz PCI. PCI-E (formerly know as
3GIO, 3rd generation input/output) is an entirely different animal,
based on serial instead of parallel transmission.

Anyway, VIA is making a southbridge that will do both PCI/AGP and
PCI-E. Should be out around mid-summer or early fall.

--
sls