Bus confusion...

[mrvikki]

Anyone out there who is bored and would like to explain the current state of the front side bus to me cause I'm thoroughly confused.

It used to be that you had say a 33MHz bus and your memory and PCI all ran at 33Mhz. Your processor (say a pentium 100)...ran at a 33MHz bus with a x3 multiplier and that was that.

Now looking at my AMD motherboard. The barton processor has a "333MHz FSB" but my bios seems to think the front side bus is 166 (1/2 of the alleged value). The board supports the 333MHz FSB but will only clock up to 200 (which is infact Overclocking the system) Where is this x2 multiplication occuring and what is the point if the bus to the rest of the system is still at 166 (and PCI is still at 33).

And Intel says it has an 800MHz FSB...is it actually 800MHz to the system or just 400 or even just 200...I know the some of the fastest memory out there is pc3200 which runs at 200MHz so what is this 800MHz FSB doing?

 

[DjKlown]

mrvikki:

You are right about the 33mhz bus and the cpu being the same....

The basic answere to your question is the DDR memory that goes with it. Dual Data Rate.

The Intel bus at 800mhz is infact 200 Mhz Fsb, but they send 2 units at once which they consider it to become 400 Mhz and then the DDR on top of that makes it the 800 Mhz FSB that you speak of.

So in fact your systems bios is actually right at the 166Mhz FSB that it was seeing. You can leave your Bios at the 200 Mhz FSB in which you said you had it at because the Barton core for AMD is a really nice overclockable chip especially if its the 2500+ barton.

Overall the Intel spanks AMD because of sending the 2 units and the slightly higher clock rate.