PC2700 and 400 FSB

[RangerRob]

I purchased a Asus P4P800-VM motherboard from Newegg.com. It has the Intel 865G chipset. I will be installing a Celeron 2.8 processor with a 400 MHz FSB. The Intel website recommends PC2700 (DDR333) memory with this FSB ( http://www.intel.com/design/chipsets/linecard.htm ). But the Asus User Guide recommends PC2100. Can I use PC2700 memory with this motherboard and CPU?

It makes sense that faster RAM can be used with a slower FSB (the RAM would just run slower), but what confused me is that the User Guide recommends PC3200/PC2700/PC2100 with a 800 FSB, but only PC2100 with a 400 FSB. It seems that the slower RAM in combo with the fast FSB would not work. Have they gotten this backwards?

 

[Crashman]

Celeron's 400MHz bus is a Quad Data Rate number representing 100MHz in actual clock cycles. DDR200 memory, aka PC1600, woulr run sychronously with it at 100MHz actual clock cycles. But since the CPU uses QDR technology (twice as much bandwidth as DDR technology), PC1600 in Dual Channel mode would be an "optimal" match.

Of course you don't see PC1600 on the market. PC3200 in Single Channel would have the same bandwidth and run at twice the actual clock frequency as your CPU.

Intel recommends PC2700 because most users dumb enough to buy a Celeron are cheap enough to buy a single channel board. The optimal single channel memory would be PC3200, but until recently it's been too expensive for these cheap systems, and haden't been officially supported by chipsets.

Sure, get PC2700. In fact, get whatever memory you like at PC2100 or faster speed. If you use it in single channel mode, run it at the highest speed possible to make up the differece.

See if Newegg has any "refurbished" P4's (these are actually retested customer returns). All the northwoods should be faster than the Celeron 2.8, except maybe the 1.6A, and even that would be a close competition.

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