Better than DDR-400?

jabaroon

Hey All,

Am thinking of upgrading to an AMD 64 and am considering the MSI K8N Neo2 (havent decided on platinum or regular). Im looking around at memory prices and I see that the mobo (from the manafacturers site) supports:

- Supports dual channel DDR 266/333/400, using four 184-pin DDR DIMMs.
- Supports a maximum memory size up to 4GB with ECC.
-Supports 2.5v DDR SDRAM DIMM.

Does this mean that the highest spec RAM I can get for it is DDR-3200??...from looking a shop4memory.com, the 3200 would seem to be very much middle of the road! (there is lots of faster stuff!).

If the above is true, what mobo should i be looking for to take advantage of the faster stuff that it out there?

Also, I have heard that Dual Channel memory on AMD gives very little of a performance boost (as opposed to it being worth while on intel). This true?

Ta,
Jab

Giblet

You can overclock to run at faster speeds. So if you want to bump up your FSB to 266 or something, you might want to by some DDR rated at 533mhz. etc etc.

jabaroon

How do I know how much I can crank the FSB up by (eg: what is supported by the mobo) and how do I correlate 266->533mhz etc..?

Thanks for the help,
Jab

Azza

Okay say you buy anything over PC 3200 speeds on an amd 64 board it will only run at PC 3200 speeds i.e 400mhz. The FSB on amd 64 is 200mhz (x2 for dual channel translates into 400mhz). When you up the fsb in the bios your ram speed goes up. So say you buy 466mhz ram i.e. PC 3700 you should be able to up your fsb up to 233mhz to take full advantage of its bandwidth. However you cpy may crap out long before you reach 233 fsb as its speed is going up as well (hence a pci lock is needed for good overclock as it allows you to lower the cpu mulitplyer)
So say you have a fsb of 200 x11 you will have a 2.2ghz cpu while the ram runs at pc 3200 (i.e 400mhz) but if you lower your cpu mulitplyer (With the aid of a pci lock) to 10 and up the the fsb to 220 you will have your cpu run at 2.2ghz again but your ram is running at 440mhz.


If you do not intend to overclock stick with pc 3200. Even with pc 3200 you will be able to overclock a little (depending on the ram) you may even achieve 216fsb (i.e pc 3500 or 433mhz ram).

The AMD 64 prefer ram with better timings. 2-2-2-5 being the best but unlikely to achieve. You can throw more voltage at the ram to get better timings or better latency. But the higher the fsb the harder it is to maintain tight timings and vice virsa. Its a trade off between the two you will need to find the best performance between timings and latency. The best ram is the ocz enhanced bandwidth for amd 64. It comes in pc 3200 3500 and 3700. The pc 3700 will hold timings of 2.5-2-2-8 at 2.8v up to to a fsb of 238 which is slightly overclocked ram speed of 476mhz. With looser timings its been known on amd 64 boards to go up to a wopping 550mhz. Its expensive stuff and unless your gonna overclock pretty unnessecary.

jabaroon

Azza, thanks for the detailed reply. Great help, Thanks,
Jab

Azza

No problem glad to help.