Dumb FSB Questions

[niroht]

If I have a CPU with 266 FSB (Athlon XP 1800+ Thoroughbred) an Epox 8rda mobo and DDR333 RAM (PC2700), is it going to be a problem that one is 266 and the other is 333? What is the best way to handle this?

 

[tuesday630]

It's not a problem. You will just have more bandwidth in your DIMM's than your memory controller can take advantage of. If you overclock your FSB, it could help also. In fact, several chipset makers are advertising DDR400 to work with 333MHz FSB. Here's what SiS writes,

"The SiS 746FX DDR-400 memory controller delivering 3.2G/B bandwidth way adequate and satisfactory to the 333MHz S2K FSB bandwidth demand of 2.7 GB/s, absolutely brings out the best performance of each other, and still has a lot to spare for the multi-I/O masters, and AGP-8X masters."


---There may be more than one way to do it, but why would anyone want to remove the fur from a feline?---

 

[Quetzacoatl]

No, you are fine, if you're not overclocking, it just means that the extra speed of the memory is going to be wasted. But it's not going to create any problems. What you have to do is set the FSB to <i><b>asynchronous</b></i> speeds. This means that your CPU will be at the 266 bus, while the memory will be at the 333 bus

Instead of Rdram, why not just merge 4 Sdram channels...

 

[niroht]

I would set that in the BIOS?

 

[Quetzacoatl]

yes, in the bios, with voltage control/bus settings (some menu like that, just look around)

Instead of Rdram, why not just merge 4 Sdram channels...

 

[niroht]

Okay, Thanks! I had the better RAM as I plan on upgrading the CPU at some point so I figured better to just upgrade the CPU then CPU and RAM. Thanks again.