Upgrading AMD CPU's

3 replies [Last post]
Bayleaf
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Joined: May 22 2002

With long rendering and encoding times, I must upgrade to a faster CPU. At the moment I have an AMD Athlon 1.01 GHz CPU installed on an ASUS A7V133-C motherboard, which has an A type socket. I would like to ask some questions if any body has some experience of what I want to do.
1] What is the fastest AMD CPU that could be fitted without changing the motherboard ? 2] How easy is it to install a new CPU ?
3] Can AMD provide CPU's with SSE (streaming SIMD extensions ) ?, required for Adobe Premiere Pro ver 1.5.

My computer spec is as follows :-
AMD Athlon 1.01 gHz processor.
Asus A7V133-C
512 MB Ram PC133
System Hard drive 20gb UDMA/EIDE ATA 100 (IBM Deskstar)
Video Hard drive 40gb 7200 rpm UDMA/EIDE ATA100 (IBM Deskstar)
External Hard drive 150 gb 7200 rpm LaCie (Firewire)
External Hard drive 120 gb 7200 rpmWorldspan (Firewire)
3½" 1.44mb Floppy disc drive
External 56k modem US- Robotics
DVD, CD, Read write Pioneer DVR A03
DVD, CD, Read write Sony DRX 510ULK
French keyboard
Netscroll Mouse PS/2
Graphics card ATI Rage Fury 32MB (Expert Pro)
Sound card (Soundblaster Live Value)

Windows XP Pro (+SP1)

Pinnacle DV500 Plus
Adobe Première ver. 6.1
Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5
Ulead DVD workshop 2
Ulead Cool3D

DV Ed
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Joined: Jun 10 2002

If your motherboard PCB is rev 1.05 it will with the latest bios 1007 support a Athlon XP 2100+(Model 6)(Palomino). However any upgrade you get will be seriously limited by the single channel memory you are using.

Bayleaf
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Joined: May 22 2002

Thanks for your info. The only reference to version number of the Asus MoBo I can find in the manual is the "Manual Revision: 1.05 E743"
The Bios is ver.1005A. I will have to physically examine the MoBo to confirm it is rev 1.05 and then upgrade the bios to 1007. What should I understand from "single channel memory"
I understand dual processors for video processing, but how does single channel memory restrict processing speed ?

DV Ed
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Joined: Jun 10 2002

Bascially you have SDRAM. For every clock cycle on the motherboard bus your ram can be accessed once. However shortly after this DDR ram came about. This allowed memory to be clocked twice on every clock cycle. Once on the rising side of the cycle and again on the falling. This pretty much doubled the memory bandwidth of the motherboard and had quite a large impact on memory speeds, and hence the speed at which the processor could communicate with memory. Which had a nice effect of speeding up many memory intensive applications. It doesnt restrict the cpu speed as so far as its clock speed goes, but can cause a huge bottleneck between the cpu and memory storage. These days DDR is very cheap and so a great upgrade option for those who still dont have it.

If you wish to stay with your motherboard you need to goto here enter your motherboard number then choose the bios 1007: [URL=www.asus.com.tw/support/cpusupport[/URL]
Although the newer AMD chips do support SSE, If you wish to use prem pro, you will need to pretty much start from scratch with a new system, as there is little hope your motherboard will ever beable to really give you the speed prem pro and you will want.