Overclocking your processor . . . memory question for new build

[Midshipman]

Almost ready to purchase my system after following a lot of the advice responses in http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/258625-31-opinions-spend

One last question:

If I purchase an e7300 with plans to increase the FSB to something line 1066 or 1333 in order to overclock it, do I need memory that runs at 1333 as well, or is the speed that a motherboard "talks" to the memory different than the speed you set for the processor? Will the memory limit my processor overclocking?

 

[Proximon]

Your memory only needs to run at double the FSB. This is not actually 1066 or 1333, but the base speed. When Intel says "1066 FSB" that's actually "quad pumped"... in other words multiplied by 4 for marketing purposes

So your actual FSB would be 266, 333, or 400 for instance.
An E7300 runs at 266Mhz x10 stock. The multiplier cannot be changed.

So, at stock speeds technically, you just need 533Mhz, but actually you'll get at least 800Mhz because it's cheap anyway.


If you manage to bump the FSB to 400, that would put the CPU at 4Ghz. I doubt you'll want to do more than that.

So, 800Mhz will do. If you think you can get it beyond 4Ghz, then you will need 1066Mhz RAM.

 

[Midshipman]

Thank you very much. That was a fantastic and very helpful reply!

 

[lunyone]

800 mHz DDR2 is all that you shoud really need. Like Proximon stated, your DDR2 runs at double the FSB, so at 400 FSB you'd be at 800mHz DDR2 speeds.

 

[cjl]

Also, note that the FSB is quad pumped and the DDR2 is dual data rate. Ideally, both would have the same base clock. For DDR2 800, this means a base clock of 400MHz. Since the FSB is quad pumped, this means that the FSB would then be 1600MHz effective. For a 1333FSB, you want DDR2-667.