RAM speeds and overclocking questions....

[Lathyl]

Hi, I have been reading these forums and searching THG etc to try and find the answer to this, but haven't been very sucessful, so I would appreciate it if someone could enlighten me as to this:

What effect does the speed of the RAM have when trying to OC, take for example an E6600 running at stock speeds, with DDR2 533MHz in dual channel (so 1066MHz? not sure about that either ). Am i right in thinking the ratio of the FSB to RAM speed is 1:1? and if so does this mean that is the E6600 is OC'd to say 3GHz (or some other arbitary value) then the RAM won't be able to keep up and system performance will not improve?

Hope that made sense, I am a bit new to RAM speeds and FSB thingys , thanks in advance...

 

[1Tanker]

Hi, I have been reading these forums and searching THG etc to try and find the answer to this, but haven't been very sucessful, so I would appreciate it if someone could enlighten me as to this:

What effect does the speed of the RAM have when trying to OC, take for example an E6600 running at stock speeds, with DDR2 533MHz in dual channel (so 1066MHz? not sure about that either ). Am i right in thinking the ratio of the FSB to RAM speed is 1:1? and if so does this mean that is the E6600 is OC'd to say 3GHz (or some other arbitary value) then the RAM won't be able to keep up and system performance will not improve?

Hope that made sense, I am a bit new to RAM speeds and FSB thingys , thanks in advance...

No, the default FSB for an E6600 is 266MHz. The FSB is "quad-pumped" with gives it an effective FSB of 1066MHz(266x4=1064). The RAM running synchronously(1:1 with FSB) is running at 266MHz, but it is Double-Data Rate which gives it an effective memory speed of 533MHz. So, DDR2-1066 would allow you to run the FSB (1:1) @ 533MHz(533x2=1066). More than enough overclocking headroom for most C2D processors, with the possible exception of E6300(highly overclocked they are occasionally[ideal circumstances] getting close to 550FSB)and X6800 with the mutiplier dropped wayyyy down for maximal FSB. Anyways...DDR2-1066 is plenty for 99% of overclocking.

 

[Lathyl]

Ahh thanks that makes a lot of sense... Unfortunately the RAM i was looking at was DDR2-533 not 1066 so i guess i will have to think about better than dirt cheap RAM