Has anyone here upgraded from AMD 761 chipset to KT333 or above?

[Sea Dragon]

Hi everyone,

I currently have a DFI AK76-SN motherboard with the AMD 761 chipset. It's been a good performer and rock-solid reliable for me. I'm wondering if upgrading the board to a newer chipset would make a tangible difference in performance levels.

Does anyone know of a review that compares 761 boards to ones with newer chipsets?

Here's my current rig:
Athlon T-bird 1.2 @ 1.244
(I'm getting a XP 2000+ processor on Wednesday.)
512 2100 DDR RAM
XP Pro
DFI AK76-SN
Geforce3 Ti200 (@ Ti500 levels)

When using 3dmark2001 (I keep "best quality" mip maps, etc... everything just the way I play (except FSAA & aniso)) and Omega's modified 30.82 drivers, I pull 6880 with this system, which I guess is about average.

I usually don't upgrade unless I can get a 1% performance increase per $5, so a 5-10% performance increase probably wouldn't make it worthwhile for me.

Do you think the AGP 4x limitation on the board will hamper the effectiveness of the NV30 or the 9700 substantially with this board?

I'm especially interested in hearing comments from those of you that have upgraded from this chipset to a new one like the Kt400 or KT333.

Thanks!

[SnakeEyes]

I upgraded from an Asus A7m266 / Athlon 1.33 to an MSI KT3Ultra-ARU / AthlonXP 2100+, but I haven't had the 1.33Ghz in the newer motherboard or the 2100+ in the old one, so I honestly can't say how the motherboard alone affects performance, other than the following:

Since the A7m266 lacks IDE RAID onboard, I was using an add-in Promise FastTrak100 PCI RAID controller with 2 IBM 60GB 60GXP 7200rpm hard drives. Performance was what I considered stellar in that setup for the drives. With the MSI, I've tried both the onboard IDE RAID controller and the add-in controller (the onboard is supposedly a Lite version of the FastTrak2000, which is DMA133 capable), and neither gives me the performance I expect from an IDE RAID 0 array with the same IBM hard drives. In fact, though performance of the drives in RAID0 is faster than either drive alone now, it's still only marginally higher. With the A7m I actually saw an increase in overall performance of between 66 and 75 percent over the single drives. I'd estimate the new motherboard is lucky if I see 10 percent better performance.

I believe the difference actually boils down to the PCI bus and the (know, documented) issues that Via chipsets have had, specifically concerning latency. This is also why I'm buying an nForce2 motherboard during my next upgrade in the spring. (To be fair, everything else seems to work great with the MSI, but the hard drives tend to be extremely noticable, especially since I play a lot of games, most of all UT and UT2003. During map loads, as in when maps change between rounds in online play, the A7m seemed to barely pause, while the new rig has a much longer delay as the drives are accessed for the maps..)

IMO, unless you can't get BIOS support for a processor you're looking at, the 761 is probably fine, and the KT333/400 won't yield a large enough improvement to justify the cost (things I wish I'd known..). And even if that's an issue, instead of the KT333 or KT400, I'd recommend looking at nForce/nForce2 as a potential replacement.

[StealthHawk]

the KT333 should be a good 10-15% faster than the AMD 761. with DDR333 memory, it might be 15%-20% faster.