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I'm just curious as to what peices of hardware I should acquire.

Which would be a better purchase, both are pretty much equivalent in cost:
AMD K7 Athlon THUNDERBIRD 650MHZ
AMD Duron Overclock to 950

What motherboard would be a good choice ? Should I go with the Abit KT7-Raid ?

Also, I am interested in 256MB Mushkin High Perf REV2 PC133 222 Ram, would this be a good choice of ram ?

If I were to try overclocking a Duron to 1GHZ, which speed Duron should I purchase ?
Everything else needed to make a pc I have covered.

i wouldn't get that hot ram, the athlon chipset will not overclovk anywhere near 150 - you could get the good pc133 for about half the price, or get twice as much - must people end up at 9.5 x105, etc - haven;t seen any fsb much over 112 after you up the multiplier - i'm waiting for my 650 tbird now !

Just get some medium quality PC133 and run them at 100mhz @ cas2, don't spend the money on those super PC-133 that does 150mhz @ cas2... it's pointless to you.

As for the CPU, why a Thunderbird 650 only? I think it had been discontinued... If you are not planning to overclock, get at least a Thunderbird 750. If you will overclock, get the Duron 750, it should go to 1Ghz easily.

also look at the Asus A7V mobo. I found it to be a little more stable than the Abit. And I do agree with not needing that high end of ram. I neded that stuff when I got back to an intel system running 180mhz bus, but it was a waste in a duron 650 @ 950 (100mhz bus). There's a lower cost variant of the A7V that lacks the ATA100 controller, you may want to look at that one if you don't have an imediate need for ATA100

So the ram is overkill, what would be a good choice of ram then ?

Would I see a really big performance difference between 1Ghz T-bird and OC'ed 1Ghz Duron ?? I'm thinking about getting the T-bird and not overclocking.

Also, if I get an ATA/100 hardrive will I see a performance difference from my ATA/66 harddrive ?

[Edited by Kazer on 12-09-2000 at 10:35 AM]

Can't help you too much, since I'm not an AMD fan...

Micron, NEC, Vit are all good. The Duron isn't as fussy about ram and OCing as other processors. Make sure you know the brand of the chips you're getting, not who assembled the mem stick.

You probably won't notice much difference between ata66 and ata100. They're both about the same cost, though.

Kazer, if you're going to get the A7V, get one with the promise ATA/100 controller just for a little future proofing.

About the RAM...Kingmax Tiny-BGA PC150 or PC133 (7ns) is good stuff...makes CAS2 and their respective max speeds...stuff's also cheaper than Crucial, Mushkin etc.

A duron 1ghz would be about as fast in real world performance as a Tbird 800....I would probably get a Tbird 750 (seems to be the sweet spot) and push it to 950-1ghz. If you're going to get a Duron and OC, get a retail 700 or 750 from Onvia. I own 3 Onvia durons (600 and two 750's) and all of them make 1ghz.

Right now there is no performance difference between ATA/100 and ATA/66. Current IDE hard drives even up to 7200RPM can't push that much data...but all HD's coming out are ATA/100 compatible so if you get a new HD, you really don't have a choice. I recommend the IBM Deskstar series (duh).

[Edited by Krish on 12-20-2000 at 06:37 PM]

Krish, I went with an Abit KT7 and AMD 1Ghz Thunderbird. I will be sticking wit my Mushkin 128MB ram for now until I can sell it off, then I will buy a stick of Kingmax 256MB ram. Because people tell me that ATA/100 wasn't much of a difference I didn't go with a board that had ATA/100. I will wait until later on in the future to upgrade or build a new comp.

If you're buying a HDD (not one already there) and you really want to see a performance gain, I'd highly recommend going to an SCSI HDD as that made a more noticable differance in speed that going from 567mhz to 1.2ghz with the same IDE 5400 RPM Maxtor did.
I'll admit that SCSI HDDs aren't cheap, especially the one I bought (Seagate Cheetah X15 15K rpm 18 gigs) but to me it was worth it.

Hmm....SCSI.....I don't think I would ever spend that much on one single computer part. I don't realy need that much more speed, I only play games on my PC anyhow. Of course when I get older I will want the fastest of everything, but for now I'll stick with the average stuff.

I'm surprised nobody mentioned teh PCI + FSB option of the Kt133 chispet.

It allows you to run the memory @ PCI + FSB (100 + 33) = 133

so if you're pushing your bus up to say 110, then 110 + 37 = 147

Better ram would be better for your, plus you can really push those memory settigns (4 way interleave, etc)