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General discussion

Ultra ATA/133 & motherboard

by texascj7 Oct 27, 2005 8:01AM PDT

Have a Maxtor Ultra ATA/133 drive that I am very happy with. I need a new mother board and CPU. When looking for a motherboard very few specs have Uata 133 listed. Am I missing something? Must the board spec's list ATA 133 for the drive to work? Would like to use both Intel CPU and MB.

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3 Posts
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The drive will RUN with any mobo
by Ray Harinec Oct 27, 2005 8:49AM PDT

Only question is whether it will have ATA133 supported [which is never actually acheived anyway].

Intel chipsets stopped the PATA ATA support at 100, because they felt that the next step would be to SATA at 150 [also not really ever acheived. LOL].

If you want ATA133 support on a mobo using an Intel chipset look at the better mobos that the overclockers use. Besides the drive support offered by the Intel Chipset, most of them hava an additional chip, possible a Promise or another make, that also supports RAID. Many such chips can be set to normal ATA rather than RAID in the BIOS.

Best to read details about such mobos in http://www.tomshardware.com or http://www.anandtech.com

Note, that things can get confusing because SATA drives are also IDE drives, thus the term IDE is NOT uniquie to ribbon cable type drives. Also note that the ATA 7 spec also includes SATA drives. The terminology can drive one bananas, especially when UDMA terminology gets thrown into the mix.

Of course one can always add a PCI ATA 133 controller card if one really thinks that one MUST have ATA133.

BTW; UDMA mode 6 is also called ATA 7 [transfer rate is 133 MB/s max, but as said not likely ever acheived because of many other limitations in the data stream], also called Ultra-ATA/133 or ATA-133.

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Tks for the info. Now
by texascj7 Oct 27, 2005 11:15AM PDT

Now I'm trying to figure out if the specs on the boards I've looked at that say ddr sdram will accept the PC 2700 DDR 333 memory I have. Would be nice if there was a newbee site that explained the basics in english. Thanks for your help.

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I assume that the mobo's that you
by Ray Harinec Oct 28, 2005 6:42AM PDT

are looking at all support PC 3200 [DDR 400]. They will all support PC2700, and, of course only have the memory bus run at the speed normal to PC2700 166/333, rather than 200/400.

The issue with using slower memory comes into play depending if the actual running speed of the CPU is determined by multiplying the speed of the memory bus or FSB.

If the Memory bus determines the FSB then if the CPU requires a faster FSB to run at full clock speed, the CPU will simply run slower [but it will run just fine].

This aspect varies depending on what type CPU you are considering, Intel or AMD.

To get help you would need to tell us more about which items that you are considering.

With the newer CPU's it can get complicated because they were all multiplier locked for years. Now many are only top locked, and the multiplier can be lowered and the memory bus overclocked to get better overall performance based on memory bandwidth. Things can get farly complex if one is into overclocking.

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