CPU FSP & HDD

[warsfear]

hey guys, just got the 2500k and someone i know is telling me that intel sucks hard and that i made a mistake.
here's the thing, he said ocing the cpu, and the faster memory i bought (2x2g 1600 cl8), does not help simply because of intel's i think 'bus limit', maybe fsp?
he says it bottlenecks it and i just wasted my money.
going into the bios i indeed saw that the memory was set to 1333 and cl9. i honestly don't understand how this is possible. could it be that everyone just buys the brand name and is wasting their money?

additionally, he said switching to ahci instead of ide for the hdd would help improve a bit of performance. i currently don't have drivers to do that (have the asrock pro3-m), does anyone know where to look, and if it's worth the change?

 

[hunter315]

The 2500K is one of the best CPUs out right now, and has an unlocked multiplier so you dont need to worry about the fact that everything shares the same clock generator. The non-K series sandy bridge processors cant be OC'd much at all because all of their clocks are tied to the same clock generator so OCing the CPU raises the frequency of the SATA and PCI-E bus which become unstable, the unlocked multiplier on the 2500K frees you of that issue.


As for your memory, 1333MHz CL9 is the default for memory, go into bios and set the speed, timings, and voltage manually(you may have to look around for a bit but dont worry, you cant screw things up too bad, you can always reset bios to default) that will bring it up to the advertised speed.

 

[warsfear]

i have no idea which voltage to choose/change. isn't it a bit odd that if buying faster memory, the company would expect any plain user to mess around with the bios?
can u please explain to me about the bus speed and why he thought i wasted my money? same clock generator? ahh, simple english!
what about the ahci

 

[hunter315]

Bad news, you are now dealing with technicalities that only affect entusiasts, ill try to keep it as simple as possible but there are limits to how simple it can get.



Now, any memory over DDR3 1333MHz is considered to be overclocked, regardless of what brand it is, DDR3 1333 MHz is the highest speed a board will default to, any more than that and you need to do it by hand because things become less stable any more finicky as the clock speed goes up so sometimes it takes a bit of fine tuning, something that the board is not capable of doing automatically so it requires you to do it by hand if you want OCed memory. If you are buying memory above 1333MHz you are automatically not considered to be a "plain user", you should know your way around BIOS and be able to figure it out, its not hard and you will figure it out as you play in there.


Busses in a computer are what hook everything together, they each run at a certain speed, in older systems they each had their own clock generator so if you increased the clock speed for the CPU it didnt affect the hard drive or PCI-E slots, with sandy bridge processors intel consolidated all of those clock generators into one, so now if you increase the CPU base clock speed you also end up increases the speed of the SATA bus and the PCI-E bus, which are meant to run at very specific speeds, any higher and they dont perform reliably.

What that means is that with any sandy bridge processor who's number doesnt end in K, you are restricted to very slight overclocks, it will let you raise the multiplier by 4 so you get 400MHz extra out of it, you cannot try to tweak it for anymore, with the 2500K and the 2600K you can keep raising the multiplier much higher and get significantly higher speed out of it since being able to change the multiplier means you dont have to get your extra speed from adjusting the base clock which would very quickly make the system unstable.


As for why your friend thought you wasted your money, thats between him and his reality...

 

[warsfear]

i adjusted the memory settings (there was an xms profile already set in the bios i switched to). went from 1333 cl9 to 1600 cl8, yet the score in windows rating stayed the same 5.9. does that make sense?

 

[hunter315]

The score in windows doesnt actually tell you much, 5.9 overall? Im betting you have a standard hard drive which means your drive score cannot break 5.9. In general faster memory doesnt give you a huge boost, its very small and only shows up in some apps and benchmarks, im not surprised that windows doesnt pick up the difference. In games the faster memory will probably only net 1-3 more FPS