CPU "raw" horsepower or high mem bandwidth - whats more important?

ozziegn

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Joined

May 18, 2003

• May 31, 2003

• #1

as the title says.

I've been playing around with my system (as usual ) and I can either have high mem bandwidth or high CPU clock speeds but I cannot have both cuz I have to use the 3:2 divider which kills my mem bandwidth.

so my question is, do you guys think that one is better than the other or does it really matter?

system details are in my sig.

 

CrashOveride

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Joined

Jun 22, 2002

Location

Asheville, NC

• May 31, 2003

• #2

Higher mem. is better unless the CPU would ran substantialy faster...

 

OP

ozziegn

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Joined

May 18, 2003

• May 31, 2003

• Thread Starter
• #3

check this out:

I've been playing with my setup and now look at what she's running at:

I now have my "raw" horsepower and good mem bandwidth again.

what a deal.

 

B

BaldHeadedDork

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Joined

Aug 18, 2002

• May 31, 2003

• #4

Cool! Glad you were able to find the sweet spot.

But to answer your question: It all depends on the app you are running. Some programs are more dependent on clock cycles and others eat all the memory bandwidth you can throw at it.



BHD

 

F

flapperhead

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Joined

Apr 27, 2002

Location

wash dc area

• Jun 3, 2003

• #5

get some good pc3700 loosen up the timings and and see if itll run a 6/5 divider, cause that would be a shame to waste any part of that 300 fsb and 3.6 cpu speed youre gettin... thats one hell of a nice overclock........

 

V

Vincey2kr1

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Jun 3, 2002

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Kansas

• Jun 3, 2003

• #6

My experience with 3dmark is Raw CPU speed gave me higher marks then higher mem bandwidth on my BD7II board, for instance a 175mhz FSB 1:1 on my P4 2.26ghz had a better score then running my FSB 165(lower CPU) with a 3:4 memory ratio close to 218mhz. Best bet is to benchmark both with an application that combines both memory and cpu situations at the same time(3dmark 2001) instead of sisoft sandra that does individual benchmarks, but hell there fun too

 

scanido

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Joined

Oct 28, 2002

Location

Toronto, Canada

• Jun 4, 2003

• #7

I remember reading from the [H] where Zroc did some pretty intensive testing with the new Canterwoods and he suggested that RAW Mhz was better than mem bandwidth.

 

Merc Zephyr

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Joined

Jun 4, 2003

Location

Ontario, Canada

• Jun 4, 2003

• #8

Example of an extreme case of an application favouring cpu horsepower over mem bandwidth:
Falcon4 - I benchmarked this flight sim at DDR266 and DDR400 with everything else being equal and the difference was 1 fps.
But for cpu, 25 [email protected] -> 34 fps @2.4GHz

Cheers