Advice on upgrade

cracker

Hi

I have asus p5w dh deluxe motherboard (Intel 975x chipset) in my PC and I am looking to upgrade the RAM and CPU
I was going to go for an Intel E6850 processor and kingston PC8500 memory
However I checked the specs of the board and they specify that it supports dual channel DDR2 800/667/ 533 so should I be going for PC6400 (which is DDR2 800 I think) or will the faster RAM give me a benefit
Also the the specs state that the board has a Front Side Bus of 1066/800MHz, the E6850 has a FSB of 1333 so should I look for something with a FSB of 1066

Thanks

Dave

brophis

Hi, as regards the RAM, I don't think PC8500 is an official specification but that's beside the point, there wouldn't be much point in buying that RAM unless you plan on overclocking. PC6400 would run normally at 800mhz and most PC6400 overclock reasonably anyhow and are generally cheaper.
As for the FSB, you can up the FSB on your motherboard to my knowledge so that won't be a problem, you might need to update the BIOS to support the new CPU however.
Hope this helps somewhat.

TerrorFirmer

As stated don't bother with 1066mhz ram unless you plan some champion overclocks. The 6850 won't work, you need an older Core 2 processor with 800/1066mhz fsb, or alternatively, a Quad Core, which actually is a better future proofing option then the 6850 in any case.

cracker

Hi thanks for the replies.

HavoK, when you say the E6860 won't work and I should get an older model do you mean it won't even run or I just won't get any benefit, would it just not run at the lower transfer rate or as brophis suggests can I not update the FSB from the BIOS? I couldn't find a site with the E6700 which is 1066Mhz FSB. Also why would the quad core work, is it just that they are all 1066 at the moment?

As regards the RAM I did some reading and I thought I had it sorted but obviously not. I read that to match CPU with RAM you check the data transfer rates so for CPU running at 1066Mhz * 8Bytes = approx 8.5gb which would mean matching it with PC2-8500. Is this wrong and if so how do you work out what you should use?

Thanks

Dave

uberpixie

cracker wrote: »

Hi thanks for the replies.

HavoK, when you say the E6860 won't work and I should get an older model do you mean it won't even run or I just won't get any benefit, would it just not run at the lower transfer rate or as brophis suggests can I not update the FSB from the BIOS? I couldn't find a site with the E6700 which is 1066Mhz FSB. Also why would the quad core work, is it just that they are all 1066 at the moment?

Your mobo supports a max of 1066 FSB.

The 6850 needs an FSB of 1333Mhz to work. It will not work on your motherboard, your motherboard will not support it.

Any 1066Mhz chip should work, if you are getting a quad make sure there is a bios update supporting it for your motherboard and the quad supports 1066Mhz fsb.

A Q6600 supports 1066 Mhz FSB for example.

daveharnett

uberpixie wrote: »

The 6850 needs an FSB of 1333Mhz to work. It will not work on your motherboard, your motherboard will not support it.

I think that's a little strong pixie. There's no hard and fast reason why the chip shouldn't work, if the clock is set to 266Mhz (ie 1333 quad pumped)instead of it's normal 333Mhz.

That said, this would mean running the chip at much less than it's stated speed. An e6800 or a q6600 (if the mobo can support quad core) would certainly be preferable.

cracker

So does this mean that although you can overclock a processor and so increase the FSB, the FSB of the motherboard is a physical restriction that can't be changed even by a bios update so this is the limiting factor when considering an upgrade?
As regards the memory, how do you know what is the optimum to pick? Is it wrong to think that because the mobo supports 1066 and if I pick a cpu with a fsb of 1066 the RAM should also be 1066 (PC2-8500)? Why would you use PC2-6400 which is 800MHz, apart from cost of course?

Thanks for all the advice so far, at least I waited before I splashed on the wrong cpu. I would like to get me head around this so I don't make the same mistake in the future so if anyone has any links to some good explanations I would be grateful, I have obviously been reading the wrong posts.