On Fri, 25 Jun 2004 03:47:49 -0700, David Off wrote:

I want to upgrade my Asus AS7-VM motherboard. It currently has an
Athlon 1GHz processor. According to Asus it will take up to a 1.4GHz
Athlon or 900 MHz Duron, I don't see why there is a difference in CPU
speed.

Forget what Asus says. It's crap.

I checked the local computer store and it is only possible to get
Duron processors, 1.4, 1.6, 1.8 GHz. Will a 1.4 GHz Duron buy me much
over a 1 GHz Athlon given the smaller on-board cache?

Any Duron should work. Although, I'd go for an XP.

The Athlon XP processor doesn't seem to be any good due to the faster
FSB speed (266 MHz as opposed to 133MHz).

There are no 266MHz AMD cpu's, only 100-200MHz. All the 266/333/400 crap
you see is just that, mraketing stratagies.

Your MB will support a fsb of up to 150MHz. See Advanced setup in manual
or bios. And even if it were limited to 100Mhz, that still wouldn't mean
you couldn't use an XP cpu. There's just 2 things that determine cpu
speed, multiplier x FSB clock= cpu clock. The highest multiplier is 24 (as
long as cpu is not a locked model), so in theory you could run a cpu at
3600MHz if you could find one that would run that fast, which you won't.
Your only gotya is the multiplier lock. If you buy a multiplier locked cpu
you can only adjust FSB to change speeds, either down or up to a max of
150MHz (but I'd say 133 to be conservative). So how fast do you want to
go, and how much are you willing to spend is the only question.

I configered a system with this MB for someone a couple of years ago and
was impressed with it's versitility for a SIS730 chipset. There's lot's
more general info in the link below. You might also not the the system
listed below is limited to 100Mhz FSB but still runs an XP cpu pretty
fast. A 3200+ only runs at 2200MHz.

--
Abit KT7-Raid (KT133) Tbred B core CPU @2400MHz (24x100FSB)
http://mysite.verizon.net/res0exft/cpu.htm