ATHLON MP

[Smapty]

i have an epox 8kta3, and i heard you can put an athlon mp into it, and it will run fine, is this true? if not, what is a cheap, but good athlon mp mobo?

 

[Smapty]

bumpty bump

 

[BurntKooshie]

some boards have issues with it. Only now do some boards have preliminary SSE support, so it's not like it's a "drop 'n run" installation for peak performance. For some boards, if it works, you'll need a bios upgrade to take advantage of some of the features of the MP.

 

[Smapty]

damn...oh well, thx

 

[Pabster]

You'll need a BIOS update to take advantage of the SSE functionality; nonetheless, you shouldn't have any problems dropping an AthlonMP in to a current board. You'll be able to reap many of the benefits regardless, such as less power, less heat dissipation, thermal protection, hardware data prefetching, etc. AthlonMP also makes far better use of DDR than the Thunderbird core.

 

[BurntKooshie]

yeah, I didn't mean to make it sound like it's totally incompatible. Prefetch'll still work other things. It should run cooler too

EDIT -- BTW, it's the hardware prefetching which makes the Athlon MP take advantage of DDR better.