>Well I have to do a plug for carpoint.msn.com as it was a wonderful resource in helping Rachel find a car.

[geek]

Update on my upgrade project. It turns out my Abit TH7-RAID motherboard is capable of a lot less then I previously thought. The system bus is 100/133mhz max. It allows you to overclock, going as high as 150mhz but that results in my other cards going *HLGZZZZ* and not working. So at a safe clock of 100mhz I upped the multiplier to 23. It runs at 23XXmhz, registers as a 2.4ghz and as far as benchmarking is concerned it’s just about (2.4/1.5)% better at 3D graphics, DivX encoding, and overall processing.

I hate to say it, but the 800mhz bus chip that I ordered from NewEgg.com didn’t cut it. Well — I actually didn’t get bold until the original chip that I ordered finally came. I cancelled the order via email, cancelled the payment with my credit company… and yet they send it to me anyhow. On top of it all it’s got a UPS tracking # on the invoice, and it was sent via FedEx with no similarities between the two tracking #s. They also left it on my steps, so as far as I’m concerned I didn’t get it. 😉

I popped in the 400mhz bus 2.4ghz and fired it up, pumped the multiplier — it gave me the same ubiquitous error msg as before, but I hit F1 to bypass. It worked great, starting up faster, and registered properly in the system properties as a 2.4ghz so that was that.

I’m running it now, works great… and now the hunt is on for a Socket 478 800mhz motherboard with RDRAM, and maybe 8X AGP… it’s a unicorn as it is (just the RDRAM part)… might as well shoot for the sky. Then I’ll have a 1.5ghz chip w/ 512mb of RDRAM & motherboard to sell off and a system bus truly worth drooling over.

[/geek]