Is PC3200 memory fast enough for the A64?

Hello!

After reading everything I could get my hands on, I had determined that the A64 I was getting would hit 2.3 GHz tops so I bought some PC3200 Mushkin Enhanced L1 RAM. Now I am seeing people pushing the A64 to 2.4+ on nForce3 boards and I am wondering if it is worth getting a hold of PC3500 memory over my 3200 I have now.

Does anyone have any thoughts or opinions on this?

I have always been a Pentium guy and always thought it was bad to run an asynchronous divider on AMDs but some of the higher OCs for the A64 seem to run on 5:6. I take it this does not cause a big performance hit?

Thanks in advance for your input.

You won't see much of a difference between the Mushkin PC3200 and PC3500 Level 1 sticks. Both use Winbond CH-5 chips. The PC3500 may be a bit better, since it's probably speed-binned, but I wouldn't worry about it too much.

As for running A64's 5:6, I really don't know much about it. However, I do know that current A64 overclocking is very limited in the fact that none of their boards (VIA or NVIDIA's) have PCI locks, so you can't really run the fsb too high.

tyson-chris,

Are you sure there are no mobos out there with PCI lock?

This is from the following review link:

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.html?i=1883&p=23

We do, however, have a word of caution. For now, you cannot adjust Athlon64 CPU speed with multipliers, as AthlonXP users have been accustomed to doing for a very long time. This makes the ability to Fix or Lock the AGP/PCI bus absolutely critical to getting the best performance from your chip. All of the nForce3-150 boards that we have seen offer a PCI/AGP lock, but we have yet to see a VIA board with a working PCI/AGP lock. All the manufacturers tell us that it is here, it will definitely be in BIOS, but we still have not seen a working lock. Until we see for ourselves that manufacturers can provide a working PCI/AGP lock, we suggest that you check carefully before buying a VIA board you intend to overclock.

I got this board after reading 2 reviews and seeing some sample rings on the forums using the nForce3 mobos. The highest OC I have seen "proof" of is 2.45 GHz which was revealed to me by glock18owner.

Seeing those kind of OCs is what got me to wondering if I had gotten RAM that is a little slow for what I intend to do. I do not know what to expect from running the memory in async mode since it is an AMD proc.

if you do decide to upgrade your ram, get black lvl2. BH-5 chips are the ****zle.

BH-5 chips are the ****zle

Click to expand...

And the sold outzle.

Vice,

The articles you read were before the discovery was made, that nvidia was pretty much lying. Their nforce3 -150 chipset does NOT have a PCI lock. You can see a link from anandtech after the discovery was made here:
http://www.anandtech.com/chipsets/showdoc.html?i=1968&p=4

AFAIK, overclockers.com was the first to make this discovery and prove nvidia's claims to be false, but I can't seem to find that article any more.

However, you may want to read this article from overclockers.com, re: Hammer and PCI speeds.

http://www.overclockers.com/pcihammer/

So, unless your hard drives and pci devices are super-resistant to high pci frequencies, you probably won't have to worry too much about your memory. As the OC.com article mentions, you probably won't get much higher than 220 "fsb", which your Level 1 PC3200 should be able to do fairly easily.

Best,