Where is the bottleneck?

Hi all.

I have 3 sets of RAM modules, a 512MB Kingston, a 256MB Infineon and
2x128MB Hynix all @ 266 and my system is Asus A7V266 (VIA-KT 266A) ,
AthlonXP 1800+ and GeForce 4 MX 440SE (64MB SDR-SDRAM).

Now when I mix two kinds of RAM e.g. Kingston+Hynix or
Kingston+Infineon game framerates were infact lower than what they
were for 512MB Kingston even though the system was on the whole quite
stable (as long as Optimized Defaults in BIOS were not used). I tried
various VIA 4in1 drivers, also both WinME (with the system.ini
modified) and Win2k but no significant difference. (btw I had used
Quake 3 demo001 to see any difference).

So pls tell me where is the bottleneck. Do I have to get a better vid
card to use all that memory efficiently or do I need a CPU upgrade or
is the VIA KT266A simply not good enough to handle over 512MB RAM or
is it case of modules not liking each other?

Thanks.

(Atul) wrote in message news:<. com>...
> Hi all.
>
> I have 3 sets of RAM modules, a 512MB Kingston, a 256MB Infineon and
> 2x128MB Hynix all @ 266 and my system is Asus A7V266 (VIA-KT 266A) ,
> AthlonXP 1800+ and GeForce 4 MX 440SE (64MB SDR-SDRAM).
>
> Now when I mix two kinds of RAM e.g. Kingston+Hynix or
> Kingston+Infineon game framerates were infact lower than what they
> were for 512MB Kingston even though the system was on the whole quite
> stable (as long as Optimized Defaults in BIOS were not used). I tried
> various VIA 4in1 drivers, also both WinME (with the system.ini
> modified) and Win2k but no significant difference. (btw I had used
> Quake 3 demo001 to see any difference).
>
> So pls tell me where is the bottleneck. Do I have to get a better vid

> card to use all that memory efficiently or do I need a CPU upgrade or
> is the VIA KT266A simply not good enough to handle over 512MB RAM or
> is it case of modules not liking each other?
>
> Thanks.



Your MX 440 is more of a bottleneck than anything. You could put a
Radeon 9000 in that system and see a nice performance increase. Any
reason you still have ME on that system?

If you have 4 sticks of RAM (different manufacturers, different
densities, and probably different speeds), then I'd guess that your
system probably is defaulting to the lowest speed RAM.

Try reading the information available at
http://www.asus.com/support/support.aspx

_________________
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(Atul) wrote in message news:<. com>...
> Hi all.
>
> I have 3 sets of RAM modules, a 512MB Kingston, a 256MB Infineon and
> 2x128MB Hynix all @ 266 and my system is Asus A7V266 (VIA-KT 266A) ,
> AthlonXP 1800+ and GeForce 4 MX 440SE (64MB SDR-SDRAM).
>
> Now when I mix two kinds of RAM e.g. Kingston+Hynix or
> Kingston+Infineon game framerates were infact lower than what they
> were for 512MB Kingston even though the system was on the whole quite
> stable (as long as Optimized Defaults in BIOS were not used). I tried
> various VIA 4in1 drivers, also both WinME (with the system.ini
> modified) and Win2k but no significant difference. (btw I had used
> Quake 3 demo001 to see any difference).
>
> So pls tell me where is the bottleneck. Do I have to get a better vid
> card to use all that memory efficiently or do I need a CPU upgrade or
> is the VIA KT266A simply not good enough to handle over 512MB RAM or
> is it case of modules not liking each other?
>
> Thanks.

(Kyle Burnam) wrote in message news:<. com>...
>Any reason you still have ME on that system?


Hahaha..yes...it is my Aztech PCI64Q3D soundcard (Trident4D Wave DX
chipset) for which there are no satisfactory Win2k/XP drivers.
Otherwise I would've preferred Win2k.

It's not a good idea to mix RAM from different makes / manufacturers.
I've been told it can have unpredictable results.

I'm not too sure on this, (something I read from an overclocker)
though you may be getting "lower performance" seeing as the RAM
modules may not be correctly "in sync" with one another and are in
fact distorting the signals passed through the bus themselves... as i
said; not too sure on that.

cheers

(g00n) wrote in message news:<. com>...
> It's not a good idea to mix RAM from different makes / manufacturers.
> I've been told it can have unpredictable results.


Really? I have a few older Athlon ~1GHz era computers with 3 unique
brand name memory sticks and haven't had any RAM related problems to
speak of.

*knock on wood*

> I'm not too sure on this, (something I read from an overclocker)
though you may be getting "lower performance" seeing as the RAM
modules may not be correctly "in sync" with one another and are in
fact distorting the signals passed through the bus themselves... as i
said; not too sure on that.

By "in sync" do you mean bus speed? The slowest stick of RAM (bus
speed) will put a burden on the other memory chips. eg. 128mb pc100 +
128mb pc128 + 128mb pc133 = ~384mb pc100.

(Kyle Burnam) wrote in message news:<. com>...
> By "in sync" do you mean bus speed? The slowest stick of RAM (bus
> speed) will put a burden on the other memory chips. eg. 128mb pc100 +
> 128mb pc128 + 128mb pc133 = ~384mb pc100.

But in my case all the modules are of same bus speed (PC 2100). Has to
be something else.

> By "in sync" do you mean bus speed? The slowest stick of RAM (bus
> speed) will put a burden on the other memory chips. eg. 128mb pc100 +
> 128mb pc128 + 128mb pc133 = ~384mb pc100.

I'm not sure what I mean... :S But running from my audio electronics
knowledge, not all transistors perform exactly the same - even though
a certain stick is said to run under a certain bus speed, it may
actually vary slightly due to its physical composition, right?
So by mixing different manufacturers sticks together just makes the
situation worse? Again.. I'm never sure on anything, thats just the
way my logic works.

Could the CPU cache size be a reason? My Athlon is 1800+ Palomino L2 Cache 256kb.