The infrastructure

Total System Cost

On average, PC1600 DDR SDRAM should cost between 5-9% more than PC133 SDRAM. Our discussions with memory manufacturers suggest that PC2100 should cost between 10-15% more than the equivalent PC133 module. It's still too early to determine motherboard prices, but with the added cost of the processor, it does appear that DDR systems will cost a bit more than their PC133 counterparts.

As AMD's lead partner for the DDR launch, Gigabyte should be the first company with DDR motherboards available on the market. 760 motherboards from other manufacturers should become available over the course of the next few months.

With AMD sticking with their current packaging for their 266MHz Athlons, it will be important to see which motherboard manufacturers announce products with multiplier adjustment. For instance, motherboard manufacturers FIC, MSI, and Gigabyte (among others) were the first with KT133 motherboards this summer. However, once ASUS and ABIT announced their products with clock multiplier adjustment (the A7V and KT7/KT7-RAID), these became the must-have motherboards for AMD enthusiasts.

We expect the same situation will occur with 760, some manufacturers will rush out their designs in attempt to get their products out the door in time for the holiday buying season. If you're not into overclocking, this isn't a big deal. But if you're looking to squeeze every ounce of performance out of your processor, you may want to wait until second generation DDR motherboards become available.

Corona!

The Southbridge

Compatibility

Our reference AMD-760 system shipped with special NVIDIA drivers for Windows 98, labeled 6.27. Out of curiosity, we also tried the official 6.31's and had no problems, although performance was about 2% faster with the 6.27's. We're unsure if NVIDIA will provide these drivers for public consumption, more than likely they will integrate the features present in 6.27 in their next driver release.

We also conducted tests in Windows 2000 with the 6.31 drivers which seemed to work fine during our limited runs. We had planned to provide a full suite of Windows 98 and Windows 2000 scores, but ran into problems installing the bus master driver in Windows 2000 that couldn't be resolved in time for this preview.