Compatibility

[eric]

I've been thinking about upgrading my computer and I came across a few questions. First of all, does the motherboard have to be designed to handle dual core processors or are they all compatible as long as the sockets match?
I have the Giga-Byte GA-81915p duo pro.

I was also curious about cpu speed. I noticed that many of the dual core processors are lower speeds. I currently have an intel 3.2 hyper threaded Prescott processor. What dual core processor would be at least equal to that?

I was looking at graphics cards as well. I currently run an x800xl and the fan stopped working. Since I need a new one I figured I might as well upgrade. I was thinking about the ATI Radeon X1650 PRO Video Card. Any feedback on this card? Thanks in advance.
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[G_Morgan]

Usually they can be made compatible but need a ROM upgrade first. Many mobo manufacturers won't do this in order to bring about more sales. Check with your manufacturer.

Clock speed does not measure performance. This is why AMD stopped listing clock speed and started listing apparent power a long time ago, Intel soon followed suit*. The real issue is how many cycles an instruction takes. Recent processors have looked at reducing the time taken to perform an instruction. In any case, the older processors don't hit clock speeds as high as they claim and even if they did the modern ones take fewer clock cycles per instruction.

*both still list Mhz but that has been used as an abstract measure of power rather than being the actual clock speed. What happened is AMD started to produce processors that had a much lower clock speed that ran much faster than the Intel equivalent. They started to list clock speeds of the Intel processors that gave equivalent power to their processors rather than listing their own clock speed. Later on Intel did something similar and for a long time we basically had a meaningless measure. The Core 2 processors actually are labelled by clock speed again.

[TcM]

Radeon? Nah that's crap! I would not buy a radeon again.... A few days ago I would have said that Radeon was not bad... but now, because of what is happening now, It is crap!