Howdy,

Well i now have a Venice core Athlong 64 3500+ w/ a nforce4 motherboard and DDR400 ram.

Does the FSB and ram have to run at the same speed? Is there any advantage to a big FSB w/ a slower memory speed?

Whats faster in application, raw memory speed or tight timings?

8/4/2006 9:49:41 AM

The FSB and Memory speeds are independent.

8/4/2006 9:58:49 AM

right, but does one bottleneck the other if theyre not the same?

8/4/2006 10:00:54 AM

http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Guides/athlon64oc/6.html

raising memory speed alone: not so good
raising FSB alone: good
raising memory and FSB together: best

8/4/2006 10:14:14 AM

Your OCing bottleneck will almost always be your RAM. It'll crap out before anything else. The thing is, we have these things called dividers these days that allow you to run your RAM at a slower speed than your FSB. Now, a lot of people say that running low dividers = bad , but it's really not the case. The way the Athlon 64 works, with the integrated memory controller and all, the most important thing when it comes to performance is your cpu's clockspeed. Memory speed, timings, out of sync or in sync, etc..... , all that shit comes out to maybe 5-10% of your total performance. If getting 200 more mhz means you have to run CAS3 instead of CAS2.5, do it. If you have to run a 9/10 divider or even a 5/6 divider, do it. Clock speed is king, its all that really matters. Here's some evidence:

http://www.dfi-street.com/forum/showthread.php?t=40178

[Edited on August 4, 2006 at 10:35 AM. Reason : woops]

8/4/2006 10:28:51 AM