DRAM Ratio - IS7-E

[Jeff the Dentist]

I "bought" 4 pieces of PC2100, that were "free AR", long before I researched and built my new computer. Last OC was a Celeron 600-900 on a BH6. I got the bug from a patient who OC'ed on an ASUS board with Intel's first Dual DDR chipset that only took PC2100, that's when I started "buying" the memory. I assumed that CPU and memory could be clocked separately, WRONG

Using a P4 2.66 (533), retail HS

All I see for speed adjustment is a ratio CPURAM of 4:5 . This seems to mean that memory would running proportionately faster than CPU so changing would be counterproductive.

At 1:1 I can't get much over 2.9 GB without locking up on games. I've increased CPU voltage moderately and DDR to 2.7 without change.

What should I expect with faster memory. This is first experience with DDR, so PC2100 translating into 133 MHz bus speed doesn't make sense to me.

Thank you,
Jeff

 

[TomG]

actually, cpu and ram can be set up asynchronous using the very ratios you described. if you could not clock them at different speeds, then there wouldn't be the ratios.

personal opinion, a P4 benefits from having fast ram because the higher the ram bandwidth, the more you can feed a cpu that is sitting there waiting on data or address information. when I benchmark a system with PC2100 (DDR266) in it, the benchmark is not quite half what I have when I benchmark DDR400. There are other differences between the machines but the ram in the system running DDR400 is clocked at 192 using 5:4 due to overclocking the CPU and the ram on the DR266 system is clocked at 266 specs.

the benchmark utility is the memory bandwidth on Sandra 2K3. the other good thing about buying faster ram is that it will always work out on a newer, faster system, assuming that the ram format of the newer system is compatible with the older system.