Need motherboard suggestions for Athlon XP

[Lord Kenneth]

What's a good board for an Athlon XP chip?

Also, what Athlon XP model gives me the biggest bang for my buck?

I have 700 dollars to spend and I'm going to beef up my computer.

[arcticpenguin]

I think mine is an ASUS A7V8X. No complaints. I would suggest putting some effort into getting a quiet CPU fan and case fans. It seems like a small thing, but it will help you to enjoy your system much more.

[Andonyx]

Have you checked Tom's Hardware (http://www.tomshardware.com/) ?

They have unusually detailed analysis of mobos including quietness, speed, reliability, and if you're into it, overclockability.

[arcticpenguin]

Originally posted by Andonyx
Have you checked Tom's Hardware (http://www.tomshardware.com/) ?

They have unusually detailed analysis of mobos including quietness, speed, reliability, and if you're into it, overclockability.
6 Athlon boards with KT600 Chipset (http://www.tomshardware.com/motherboard/20030908/index.html)

[egslim]

Honestly, THG usually isn't the best source for reviews. Their selection of benchmarks is doubtful and their analysis looks like it's pulled from thin air. Among the more technically familiar (=nerds :D ) almost everybody loathes THG. This also has to do with them frequently braking NDA's - by accident, of course. :rolleyes:

Try www.anandtech.com instead. Personally I would prefer the A7N8X DeLuxe, with an nForce chipset. It has 5.1 sound comparable to a Soundblaster Live!, and dual ethernet connections. These take far less CPU cycles then VIA's solutions.
Something like a 2500+ is both cheap and performs well enough.

[ImpyTimpy]

Blah, I personally prefer the Intel chips. I used to be into Athlons except Intel is now providing much more power (yes, the costs are higher) and more stability (in my opinion). If you want more power, I suggest jumping ship to Intel for now (although your costs will go up). Also maybe it's just me but the Intel chips seem to run much cooler...

However, as others have already mentionned go with the ASUS montherboard with nForce chipset if you want to stick with Athlons. Asus mobo deluxe versions are quiet rich in features and from the benchmarks appear to be the best performers. Stay away from Athlon XP 3200... From what I hear it's pretty much a waste of dollars (the performance isn't worth the money it costs). Personally I'd go with Athlon XP 2600, it's more then fast enough for new games and it's cheap... But only if I was to buy an Athlon which I wouldn't in the first place :p

[Sindai]

Originally posted by Lord Kenneth
What's a good board for an Athlon XP chip?

Also, what Athlon XP model gives me the biggest bang for my buck?

I have 700 dollars to spend and I'm going to beef up my computer.

If you have 700 dollars I'd go ahead and build a Pentium 4C-based machine. While AMD is still great if you're on a tight budget (like me), past a certain price-point (which you are) Intel actually gives you more bang for your buck thanks to the big edge having double or more the Front-Side Bus speed gives.

[a_unique_person]

Or you could just wait for the 64bit athlon to come out. Then you would have pretty good bragging rights.

I would definitely go for the latest, greatest chipset. The motherboards, which seemd to be stuck on 133 MHz busses for years, are changing rapidly. A good, fast FSB, fast Hard Disk and just a reasonable processor will get you much more performance, since most of the time, the machine is waiting for hard disk or memory. Definitely get the ata-serial, as fast as scsi but cheaper. Fast FSB will give you fast memory access.

The big question, of course, is what colour scheme should the flouro lights be. Pink and blue is so last century.

[ImpyTimpy]

If you really want to show off, wait for the Pentium 4 EE... That thing blows the competition out of the water.

[Iconoclast]

Originally posted by egslim
Personally I would prefer the A7N8X DeLuxe, with an nForce chipset. It has 5.1 sound comparable to a Soundblaster Live!, and dual ethernet connections. These take far less CPU cycles then VIA's solutions.
I'm using this motherboard at the moment and it's very nice. It also has 6 USB ports, on board RAID controller, and it talks to you during the pre-boot sequence.

[AlienX]

From experience i would get the ASUS A7N8X and not the A7V8X.

I've got 3 machines and of the two athalons I have the A7N8X (Nvidia chipset) is the better board - faster and slightly more stable than the A7V8X (Via chipset). Both have 2800+ cpus and they run blisteringly hot. Get a big PSU if you plan on any athalon system (i would suggest one of the silent Enermax PSU's - like the 550).

My 3rd machine is a P4 2.67 running at 3ghz. Absolutely rock solid (ASUS board again - latest one and i forget the code) - anyway its much easier to setup and is significantly more stable than the athalon based units i've got. Both Aths have had various issues with stability - the p4 has never crashed.

Both Aths run >50 deg C whereas my pent overclocked runs 30-32 deg C (with all the internal case fans off). So a pent can ultimately be more quiet.

People put up with the Athalon stability issues when they were the fastest.. now Intel have taken the lead again... so after many years i'm moving back to intel. Anyway there is little diff in price between the barton and a comparative p4. Although a good p4 mobo is more expensive.

From the current 32 bit XP chips the Bartons are the fastest, really they are the same chip as standard but with more cache ram - this really hikes up the price tho. Usually going one chip down from the current top gives you most bang for your money.

ohh and don't skimp on some crappy ram - get something like Corsair paired ram and dual DDR it on an A7N8X (The A7V8X cant dual DDR and can only run pc3200 on one stick of ram :-( - put 2 in any it drops to 2700!!). The V8X isn't a bad board - just the day it was released it was instantly bettered.

If you buy low quality ram you will find stability issues when running your FSB at 200 mhz (as it's DDR they quote the ram is running at 2x 200 - hence the V8X is KT400).
You can never have too much memory.

AX

[richardm]

Ahhh... this thread has cheered me up enormously, since I've just bought an ASUS A7N8X (Deluxe!) and an Athlon XP. Nice to know I've made a good choice for a change ;)

Now, if the idle sods at Securicor-Omega can just get off their fat behinds and deliver the blasted thing I'll be even happier... (1 week in their depot and counting :mad: )

[egslim]

Or you could just wait for the 64bit athlon to come out. Then you would have pretty good bragging rights.
Actually, it's already available (Athlon 64) and looking rather well. But I think it's just out of the $ 700 price range if you have to buy memory as well. Might be worth taking a look, anyway.

As for P4 EE, it would cost $ 700 for the CPU alone, never mind the fact that it is completely unavailable. Also, there are questions wether it will ever be more then a paper product. It still isn't as fast as the Athlon 64 FX, which is already available. But these CPU's are definately out of your price range.

Extra advantage for the A64 is that it uses less power than P4 or AXP. Also, when CPU load is low, it will underclock itself and lower the voltage (AMD's Cool 'n Quiet). Saving power and fanspeed thus noise can be lowered further. However, this feature has to be supported by the motherboard. The MSI board does, among others.

A point of advice: After you've built the system, first run memtest (www.memtest86.com) one or two loops. If you get errors there is something wrong with your memory, the system will be unstable.
Two: Run CPU-burn (http://users.ev1.net/~redelm/) for an hour, select K7 on the left. Do this when the casing is already closed. If it makes the system reboot or lock-up you have insufficient cooling.
Actually, I advise everyone with stability problems to run these two programs.

[a_unique_person]

Thanks for memtest, I've been after something like that for years, but only found crippled shareware.

[corplinx]

I used to care about mobos. Nowadays its more of a combination of the form factor and the mobo.

I think I am going to use a shuttle XPC for my next system. The 45G works with _every_ socket A athlon chip.

[arcticpenguin]

Originally posted by corplinx
I used to care about mobos. Nowadays its more of a combination of the form factor and the mobo.

I think I am going to use a shuttle XPC for my next system. The 45G works with _every_ socket A athlon chip.
Here's the next mobo I'm going to buy: the Lippert Thunderbird (http://www.lippert-at.com/miniitx.html). A cool, powerful Pentium M in the Mini-ITX format; 170 x 170 mm. Built-in graphics and USB2.0, dual network interfaces.

[Underemployed]

Anything by Asus is good, also Soltek and Abit are good brands. For now the NForce (Nvidia) chipset ones seem to be speedier and plenty stable.

Right now, if costs must be kept low and you are not afraid of overclocking, get a 2500+XP (the lowest Barton model) and some good 400Mhz RAM, a board with plenty of features and overclock it to 3200+ speeds, which most users on enthusiast forums have been doing for some time with no ill-effects. The CPU is now very cheap for the performance.

If you really must spend all the cash, spend it all on a matched pair of branded 400Mhz or above DDR RAM and any top-end AMD-based motherboard with the NForce chipset, plus a couple of SATA drives to run as a RAID 0 array, then whatever is left over on a CPU.

If super graphics in your games is all you want, stick with your current setup and buy a Radeon 9800XT and a faster CPU.

[ImpyTimpy]

Wait, hold on. Where do you have the benchmark figures showing that the new Athlon is faster then P4EE? The only bechmark I can find is Tom's Hardware here


http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030923/athlon_64-53.html

They're saying the P4EE is actually faster in more applications then the new athlon.

Originally posted by egslim

--snipped--
As for P4 EE, it would cost $ 700 for the CPU alone, never mind the fact that it is completely unavailable. Also, there are questions wether it will ever be more then a paper product. It still isn't as fast as the Athlon 64 FX, which is already available. But these CPU's are definately out of your price range.
--snipped--

[egslim]

As I've said, THG really isn't a high quality site. It is more like the laughing stock among most hardware enthousiasts.

Aceshardware compared the FX51 to the P4 EE 3.2GHz as well. They also tested a P4 EE 3.4GHz, which one should discard since it wasn't even announced. Same goes for the FX 51 @ 2.4GHz. You can find a summary of the results here: http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=60000267

Edited to add:
Mistakes from the THG article:
Apart from new features such as the integrated memory controller and the enlarged L2 cache (1 MB, 16-way associative), the rest of the features remain largely unchanged.
Actually, most of the internal parts were ripped out and redone. The front end of the core especially is very different.

By comparison, the Pentium 4 with 533 MHz FSB allows a maximum data throughput of 3.97 GB/s
It's 4.2GB/s.

However, we doubt that AMD's yield will be any more than 30%.
Yields are probably the most guarded secrets in the industry. It is extremely improbable that THG has actual numbers, instead of something from their rear-end.

Update Sept 24,2003: Unfortunately we have made a mistake in the original article: In addition to the official P4 EE 3.2GHz we had included benchmark scores of the P4 Extreme 3.4GHz and 3.6GHz. These values were planned for a future THG article and were not intended to be included here. We would like to apologize especially to those readers who misinterpreted our charts. The two bars of the P4 Extreme 3.4GHz and 3.6GHz have now been removed. However, this issue does not affect our conclusion as we have only compared the official P4 3.2GHz EE to all other test candidates in our original article. For your information:
One should hope THG would finally learn from this mistake, since something similar has happened again and again and again. Of course, they have already gotten their pagehits so this update doesn't really matter anymore... :rolleyes:

On their benchmark suite:
SPEC is interesting, but hardly so for consumers.
Comanche is often tested, because of it's built-in benchmark mode. However, very few people actually play the game...
(In comparisson, Aces started a discussion at their board about which games people would like to see included.)
3DMark '03 is a very poor benchmark, because an PII 350MHz/R9700 can beat a P4 2.8GHz/R9600. http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=60000242
Sysmark 2002 is been long dicredited, many sites have stopped using it. When the changes between 2001 and 2002 were analyzed, it appeared that most test which favoured AMD were scrapped, and all new tests favoured Intels P4. No explanation was given by BapCo. We do know that Intel was a member of BapCo, AMD wasn't. At some point, BapCo was even located in an Intel building...

Well, this analysis shows I have way too much free time. ;)

[AlienX]

I've had a couple small form factor PC and they have their uses. If your a power user or gamer steer well clear.

they are too compact to offer sufficient cooling (I would go Pentium due to the lower temp they run at compared to aths).

The main problem with them though is power, stick in say an AIW 9700/9800 or one of the latest GeForce FX cards and it will groan under the strain. I've tested about 3 SFF machines and none of them would turn on with an AIW card in :-(.

Yep SFF are great if you just want a toy system with limited expandability and dont want to play games. There has been talk of how they now rival standard desktop machines but ive not seen any evidence to support this notion yet. They are a niche product and quite smart and for people who don't care about PC power then they are an option, their most common use I would assume is as an addition to your main PC.

In essence SFF looks really good but as usual the reality of using one day to day soon wears off and sitting looking cool on your desk stops being a factor ;-).

AX

[arcticpenguin]

Originally posted by AlienX
I've had a couple small form factor PC and they have their uses. If your a power user or gamer steer well clear.

If this in in response to my mini-ITX info, don't worry. That will not be my primary machine. It is to fill one particular niche use in the lab, all it has to do is fill that niche successfully. If it can do that, the quietness and smallness will be of significant benefit.

[ImpyTimpy]

Originally posted by egslim
As I've said, THG really isn't a high quality site. It is more like the laughing stock among most hardware enthousiasts.

I know, but that was the only comparison I could find.

Aceshardware compared the FX51 to the P4 EE 3.2GHz as well. They also tested a P4 EE 3.4GHz, which one should discard since it wasn't even announced. Same goes for the FX 51 @ 2.4GHz. You can find a summary of the results here: http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=60000267

Thanks for that. I'm hoping for more websites to come forward and show the comparisons, although having given this a bit of thought I think the results will be the same. Intel simply increased the amount of cache on that chip. I guess we have to wait for the new offering from Intel before they become competitive again :)


Edited to add:
Mistakes from the THG article:

Actually, most of the internal parts were ripped out and redone. The front end of the core especially is very different.


It's 4.2GB/s.


Yields are probably the most guarded secrets in the industry. It is extremely improbable that THG has actual numbers, instead of something from their rear-end.

That struck me as odd as well. Where they get those figures from is anyone's guess.


One should hope THG would finally learn from this mistake, since something similar has happened again and again and again. Of course, they have already gotten their pagehits so this update doesn't really matter anymore... :rolleyes:

On their benchmark suite:
SPEC is interesting, but hardly so for consumers.
Comanche is often tested, because of it's built-in benchmark mode. However, very few people actually play the game...
(In comparisson, Aces started a discussion at their board about which games people would like to see included.)
3DMark '03 is a very poor benchmark, because an PII 350MHz/R9700 can beat a P4 2.8GHz/R9600.

3DMark03 is oriented towards testing graphic cards (it relies heavily on the GPU not the CPU, unlike it's predecessor) however if we're comparing two processors on the same video card, the results I believe are valid.


http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=60000242
Sysmark 2002 is been long dicredited, many sites have stopped using it. When the changes between 2001 and 2002 were analyzed, it appeared that most test which favoured AMD were scrapped, and all new tests favoured Intels P4. No explanation was given by BapCo. We do know that Intel was a member of BapCo, AMD wasn't. At some point, BapCo was even located in an Intel building...

Well, this analysis shows I have way too much free time. ;)
I think most bencharks should be treated with a grain of salt to be honest. Take the recent NVidia vs. ATI debate. 3DMark03 first said NVidia is cheating and then changed their tune to say they're optimizing the code the second NVidia paid their dues.

[richardm]

Originally posted by richardm
Ahhh... this thread has cheered me up enormously, since I've just bought an ASUS A7N8X (Deluxe!) and an Athlon XP. Nice to know I've made a good choice for a change ;)

Now, if the idle sods at Securicor-Omega can just get off their fat behinds and deliver the blasted thing I'll be even happier... (1 week in their depot and counting :mad: )

Securicor have now got themselves organised and delivered my goodies, and I've got them all safely installed and working.

But I have a couple of questions for those of you who already have this motherboard...

First of all, it checks for RAID drives every time it boots - and never finds them (reasonably enough). But pressing F4 or CTRL-F as indicated doesn't bring up a config screen, instead the machine stops booting. If I ignore it it posts an error and continues happily.

How do I stop this?

Secondly, it is reporting the speed of my CPU as 1300MHz. Since it's got a 3000+ Athlon in there I'd have expected to see something like 2000MHz + in there. Is it just misreporting, or is there something in the BIOS I need to set?

Thanks in advance!

[Iconoclast]

Originally posted by richardm
But I have a couple of questions for those of you who already have this motherboard...

First of all, it checks for RAID drives every time it boots - and never finds them (reasonably enough). But pressing F4 or CTRL-F as indicated doesn't bring up a config screen, instead the machine stops booting. If I ignore it it posts an error and continues happily.

How do I stop this?

Well, it's just telling you it's looking for the Raid drives, then it tells you it didn't find them and continues on, no problems. I've never hit F4 to go to the setup screen, I just let it run. Don't know if you can set it to not check for Raid drives.

Originally posted by richardm
Secondly, it is reporting the speed of my CPU as 1300MHz. Since it's got a 3000+ Athlon in there I'd have expected to see something like 2000MHz + in there. Is it just misreporting, or is there something in the BIOS I need to set?

Thanks in advance!
No, you probably have to tweak the settings in the BIOS. Section 4.4.2 in your manual expains how to set it up, but the problem is it's not very clear, so:

- First of all, the version of the BIOS that came installed in your motherboard may not have the settings required for your chip. I found the settings didn't go high enough for mine so I had to download and install the latest version from the ASUS website which tells you the minimum BIOS version required to drive different processors. The latest version is 1005.

- In the BIOS Program, go to Advanced -> Advanced Chipset Features

- Now, you need to know the FSB frequency of your processor, if you've got a new Athlon XP then it's probably 333MHz, it's written on the package that the chip came in that you threw away. The first setting on the Advanced Chipset Features (CPU External Freq) screen should be half your FSB frequency. So, for a 333MHz FSB, set this to 166MHz. You'll also need to know the nominal CPU speed of your chip, I'd guess it's around 2.4GHz for your AMD 3000+ monster.

- The first setting (CPU External Freq) multiplied by the third setting (CPU Frequency Multiple) should be equal to the processor clock speed. The motherboard initially autodetects these settings and they'll be most likely wrong. So, change the second setting (CPU Freuency Multiple Setting) from "Auto" to "Menu". Now you can set the correct multiple to get your desired clock rate, and this is when you'll know whether or not you need a later version of the BIOS. If your BIOS version isn't new enough, then the selection of multipliers won't go high enough for you to reach your CPU speed. My AMD 2600+ has a default processor speed of 2.085GHz, so I set the multiplier to 12.5X.

- You also have to set the memory speed, and that's tricky too. I'd bought PC2700 DDR memory sticks that happened to have the same 333MHz speed as the processor FSB so I set the 6th setting (Memory Frequency) to 100% which resulted in the 7th setting (Resulting Frequency) being the same as the CPU External Frequency of 166MHz and it was all good.

- Note that if you set any of these settings too high your machine won't boot at all when you restart it (you'll just get a blank screen) and you'll have to reset the BIOS using the procedure set out in the manual and do it all again.

- Also, if you set your settings too slow for your chip you won't be able to get your operating system to install from the CD, you'll get bizarre errors and lockups, something to look out for. I'd assumed I could leave all the motherboard settings at their default and then turn them up after I had the machine up and running with an OS, it never occured to me that the machine wouldn't work if it was setup too slow.

[richardm]

Originally posted by Iconoclast

Well, it's just telling you it's looking for the Raid drives, then it tells you it didn't find them and continues on, no problems. I've never hit F4 to go to the setup screen, I just let it run. Don't know if you can set it to not check for Raid drives.


Fair enough - it's just a little vexing waiting for something to timeout when I already know it's not going to find anything!

As for the rest of your advice - Wunderbar! Right on the money! Thanks very much! I had looked at the manual and pretty much gone "Duh!". Things have moved on from the days when you put things together and they either worked or didn't - all this configuration malarky is new to me. I assumed that it would correctly sort its own defaults out, but nooooo.

Thanks again!

[Whomp]

As this started out with motherboard suggestions:

The Epox 8rda+ and 8rga+ are excellent AMD boards.
The 8rga+ is different in that it includes the NForce 2 graphics processor, so no seperate card is needed.

This board is very stable, overclocks well, and has been an all around pleasure to work with.

And it's priced right too!

Whomp!

[Iconoclast]

Originally posted by richardm
Things have moved on from the days when you put things together and they either worked or didn't - all this configuration malarky is new to me.
Glad I'm not the only one who got this surprise. The last tiome I put a machine together was maybe 10 years ago and it was just A B C back then, plug it all together and switch it on. I think the ASUS manual should have a big note near the beginning telling the user that the machine probably won't work out of the box, that they'll have to play with the settings before they can make it run. Would have saved me a very long night a couple of months ago.

[egslim]

Thanks for that. I'm hoping for more websites to come forward and show the comparisons, although having given this a bit of thought I think the results will be the same. Intel simply increased the amount of cache on that chip. I guess we have to wait for the new offering from Intel before they become competitive again
True, and that (Prescott) seems to be delayed until late januari: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=12013
The reason it's very hard to find P4 EE benchmarks is because the CPU is in such short supply. I was told it would be at least a month until ANY P4 EE sample will be available for testing in Holland.
I don't mind, we need competition and for that to continue AMD needs to cut back on the red ink for a while.

I think most bencharks should be treated with a grain of salt to be honest. Take the recent NVidia vs. ATI debate. 3DMark03 first said NVidia is cheating and then changed their tune to say they're optimizing the code the second NVidia paid their dues.
Very true. However, what I heard is that Futuremark didn't get any money from nVidia, but was threatened with a court case for libel instead.

Fair enough - it's just a little vexing waiting for something to timeout when I already know it's not going to find anything!
In the BIOS there will be some kind of section about peripherals or something. You should be able to turn the RAID controller off there.

[a_unique_person]

Originally posted by richardm


First of all, it checks for RAID drives every time it boots - and never finds them (reasonably enough). But pressing F4 or CTRL-F as indicated doesn't bring up a config screen, instead the machine stops booting. If I ignore it it posts an error and continues happily.



The RAID chip is a separate entity, if it works the way one of my mobos did with four IDE drive connectors.

It will always do it's bit at startup, no matter what. The config screen is just to config the drives it detects. You cannot disable. it.



Thanks in advance!

[Reaver]

Hi LK,
It would've been helpful if you gave us more information on your needs. For example I got the Asus a7n8x deluxe, 'cause I wanted the onboard LAN and SATA. But I don't know if you want those things. If not you could easily go for a cheaper board or one like the Albatron which lacks those thigns but comes with an onbaord Geforce 4MX.
As for the CPU, in Australia (it might not be the same in the US) there are relatively large gaps between the prices of the XP2600+ to the XP2800+ and then another gap between the XP3000+ and XP3200+. So I'd recommend the 2600 or 3000. However the 3200 is the only one with a 400 FSB.

PS this posting thingo is cramped in Mozilla.

[egslim]

It will always do it's bit at startup, no matter what. The config screen is just to config the drives it detects. You cannot disable. it.
Well I can on my board, and on any other board I've tested. If you don't have anything connected to it, that is. In BIOS there is some setting under "Peripherals" or something that will disable the RAID chip. It can be al little hard to find sometimes, but it's always there.

[!Xx+-Rational-+xX!]

Why would you people respond to this since it's based on an anecdotal claim? He probably doesn't have an athlon xp chip and it would be irrational to think otherwise based on this anecdotal question.

[Skeptoid]

Originally posted by traveller
Why would you people respond to this since it's based on an anecdotal claim? He probably doesn't have an athlon xp chip and it would be irrational to think otherwise based on this anecdotal question.
You're quite the nutjob, aren't you? :rolleyes:

[richardm]

Originally posted by egslim

Well I can on my board, and on any other board I've tested. If you don't have anything connected to it, that is. In BIOS there is some setting under "Peripherals" or something that will disable the RAID chip. It can be al little hard to find sometimes, but it's always there.

I did expect to be able to find it in the BIOS, but it really doesn't appear to be.

It reminds me most of the old Adaptec SCSI adaptor I used to have, right down to they style of the message. This suggests (as does AUP) that it's a completely separate entity. And there's not even find a jumper on the motherboard to disable it. Quite odd really.

[egslim]

You're right, it's not in the BIOS. However, there does seem to be a jumper to disable the SATA controller. It's just below right of the CMOS battery. Check page 19 in the manual, chapter 2.7

[richardm]

Originally posted by egslim
You're right, it's not in the BIOS. However, there does seem to be a jumper to disable the SATA controller. It's just below right of the CMOS battery. Check page 19 in the manual, chapter 2.7


Hey, now my machine won't boot at all :mad:

[richardm]

Only joking :D

Yes, you're quite right, that was it. I did actually look at that , but tuned out at the word "Serial" - 'not what I'm looking for'. Since "Serial" was the first word, I didn't read the rest of it, which might have given me a clue. I'm a terrible "skimmer" of manuals, as is probably all too evident from my desperate pleas for help!

Anyway - that has removed the problem, such as it was. Thanks for taking the trouble to check for me, and correcting my reading comprehension difficulties :D