Athlon 64 motherboards

[MJCfromCT]

Hi all,

When the Athlon 64 motherboards come out, what type(s) of RAM will they be supporting? Would it make sense for me to use the same pc2700/3200 ram i have if and when i upgrade to one of these new boards?

Also, how expensive will the Athlon 64 chips be? I read an article that said one online retailer was selling them for around 900 dollars and would only special order them from AMD...

[Peter M]

Athlon-64 will use unbuffered, non-ECC DDR SDRAM, presumably at 166 MHz (aka PC2700).

Prices are not confirmed yet, what you see there probably are Opteron prices - and these range from affordable to hugely expensive, depending on what speed grade and N-way-ness you want.

[Dracas]

I keep wonderinf if (by their release in Sept.) they won't have tried to step up the design for DDR 400 (PC3200) since JEDEC has finally accepted it as a standard, initially though it doesn't look like it huh.

If anyhting PC3200 should make it to the A-64 San Diego's right? (90nm Athlon64's)

Course, PC3200 is buggy as heck, to much taffy pullin' on an old TSOP technology :p It's literally overclocked PC2100/PC2700, hence the heat spreaders *ducks* :t

[MJCfromCT]

Dracas,

So if i wanted to upgrade my pc2700 ram on my current motherboard, what type of ram should i get? i want it to be a smooth transition from Athlon XP to Athlon 64....by that i mean that i want the RAM i have to be the RAM i can use in an Athlon 64 mobo

[Dracas]

Keep your current (PC2700) memory, its the only Memory that the 1st (and possibly 2nd) generation Athlon 64 Processor's officially support.

PC3200/PC3500/PC3700/PC4200 is all Overclocker-ware, the faster they push the TSOP package, the greater the coincidence of 'Dead-on-Arrival' modules, due to the variations in mainboard memory and voltage controllers.

Depending on the embedded Memory controller in the Athlon64, you may see less memory incompatiblity standards due to the 'market enforced' standard (compliance with Athlon64 circuitry)

Keep what you got for now, wait to see if they come out with official PC3200 support for the 90nm Athlon64 San Diego's then upgrade (it could be a year or so).

Hope thats helpful :t

[Someone Stupid]

Dracas: Read Andantech's article on how they are achieving DDR 500 on giel sticks (3700) - still on first page... all I need to say is they are using the samsung chips that 2700's use and a laser is involved. :) Main problem is heat, remove some unneeded material and slap some heatsinks on them and presto - the faster sticks are getting more reliable now as there is a market for it with the P4C's loving ddr400+ and AMD camp overclockers wanting 400+ fsb. 3200 now is generally solid. Above that has been iffy, but since the P4C's release, companies have been toying with ram to get it to run faster reliable, finally getting solid results.