Kinda a lot o questions (please help!)

[Matrisking]

Hello all, I am going to upgrade my computer, but I have a few questions, so if anyone knows the answer to any of these, I would appreciate it if you would help me out. Thanx!

1) I read the following description of some RAM: PC100 16x64 128MB. I know that it is 128 megs, but what does the PC 100 and 16x64 mean?
2) What is the difference between PCI and AGP slots and how do I know how many I'm going to need?
3) If I upgrade my mobo, how will I know if I need a new case, and if I do need one, how do I know what size, kind, etc.?
4) Is the Voodoo 3 2000 PCI w/16 megs going to last me for a while, or will it soon become obsolete?
5) What is the difference between Pentiums and Celerons?
6) What is the difference between Pentiums and K6s?

These are probably basic questions, but thanks anyways!

[apollo11]

Hi there - a couple of answers,

1. PC100 ram is what most people go for (for the BX chipset)- it comes in 2 verieties that which runs at 100MHz and 125MHz. Basically if you are going for a PIII or a celleron you will be fine with this as the FSB will be either 66MHz or 100MHz (if you are not a O'clocker :-)

2. AGP is basically faster because the data does not have to go via the PCI bus to get to the CPU. have a look at this article for more details. http://www.anandtech.com/html/review_display.cfm?document=105
In figure terms PCI = max of 33Mhz
AGP (X4) max = 133Mhz

3. You can tell by the form factor - most are ATX which you can specify when purchasing the case. Just make sure that the Form factor of the case and the M/B are the same.

4. G/C should be ok - I know that the AGP version is very fast. You could leave that for a while anyway :-) At least until all the new generation of cards come out.

5. Pentiums use a front side bus of 100MHz (and soon to be 133 with the i820)
Cellerons has a FSB of 66MHz.
Pentiums have a large L2 cache but it only runs at half the speed of the core while the cellerons have 128k of L2 cache but it runs at the full speed on the core - which makes then very fast.
Cellerons - socket 370 Pentiums - slot 1
PentiumII's have the SSE streaming SIMD enhancements.

6. K6 2's have a poor floating point unit and run on the Socket 7 board. Really cannot compete with the Celleron for speed or Price - K7's nice though :-)

Hope some of this is useful - bit of a choice to make- all depends on what the rig's for.

[Bleeding Edge]

Additional comments:

1. PC100 memory modules must conform to the PC100 industry standards. PC133 is the newer standard, which is backward compatible to PC100.

16x64. The 16 reflects the number of chips on the module. The 64-bit indicates that the chips are non-ECC. ECC, Error Checking Correction (1 bit correction) memory is of the 72-bit variety. 16x72.

2. As of today, the motherboards in production have only one Accelerated Graphics Port. This is to be used with the AGP vidcard and nothing else. An additional PCI vidcard can be installed for a dual monitor setup. A 4X AGP bus can transfer nearly 1 gigabyte of data a second. Compare that with the 130MB or so of a PCI bus.

The typical number of PCI slots on a motherboard today is five. These slots can accommodate various add-in cards. such as SCSI, network, sound, TV tuner, modem, extra parallel port cards, drive controllers and such. An ISA modem can be installed in one of the legacy ISA slots on the motherboard, to keep a PCI slot available for something more demanding.

3. ATX motherboard = ATX case and ATX power supply.

4. Get something in the AGP flavor.

5. http://developer.intel.com/design/processor/

6. Not much to say about AMD but that they are operating way in the red. (Financially)