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Adjusting Ram Timings

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fac_29

Member
Joined
Feb 25, 2004
Location
Manchester, England
My Motherboard is a bit limited when it comes to adjusting Ram timings i have read, its fine for everything else. It only has an option to alter the CL value. Until(and if) they release a new Bios with more options in i think this is gonna limit me when overclocking the Ram. Is there any other way i can alter the timings? A software download maybe? It supports stepless adjusting of FSB from 50 to 248mhz max. So i should easily be able to overclock this stick of PC2700 i have to PC3200?(if the Ram will take it)

This is gonna be my first ever overclock so i'm tryin to read up as much as i can before i go ahead.
 
dont worry about the timmings right this minute if u plan on ocing...once you oc then worry how tight you can get your timmings
 
RAM timing is sort of like fine tuning. It's more important to get the CPU clock speed and memory bus speed running as fast as possible, but still staying stable. CL (or sometimes called CAS) is probably the more important component of RAM timing, so if that's all you have to adjust, you won't be missing a whole lot... just a little. The lower the CL number, the faster the timing, but it could also hurt stability.
 
Thanks. So that doesnt matter quite as much as i thought. There is a new Bios but not sure whether that has any helpful new features, guess i'll have to try it. The board has some kind of feature where adjusting the FSB doesnt affect the AGP or PCI Speed at all. I guess thats something?
 
HI sounds like fac_29 has the same board as me. First oc'lock for me also.
Seem to be at about the same stage, thinking about the low ram adjustment.
Let me know how youget on fac as I am one step behind you with the same issues.. Just waiting for the pc to arrive Not exactly sure what my ram is till it gets here..
Just going to run it for a while read up some more and read the posts then round about next week mid week will do the oc'lock.
Feel free to mail me if you come across anything interesting in your research.
Cheers to everyone that replies to posts. It is really helpful and confidence building for a newbie oc'clocker
Trug
 
One more thing briefly cuz not sure where to post this.
The onboard vga is going to be pretty basic I am aware of that.
I do a lot of graphic work and want to run two monitors.

If I run a second monitor from the x8 agp would the onboard 128 bit Unichrome 3D Graphic would that degrade the performance of my graphics card that I instal ? I mean would the slower onboard force the ge force card to operate at the slower performance ?

Cheers
Trug
 
The Onboard S3 Unichrome Graphics is very poor really. I got around 1300 Marks in 3D Mark2001SE using it :p Its actually 64MB and it uses system memory, doesnt have its own memory. So if you have 512MB in your system it will actually show up as 448MB because 64MB is assigned to your onboard graphics. Whether it would degrade whatever AGP Graphics Card you go for i aint certain, never thought about it actually. I'm sure someone here could answer that one thou.

Well i'm waiting till i've got all my proper cooling installed before i begin to overclock, which shouldnt be long really.
 
Trugmolly,

Check your board documentation and see if you can't disable the onboard vga. Since you indicated you have an AGP slot, you must be able to disable the onboard graphics. Then either (1) get a dual head AGP card, if you haven't bought one already, or (2) if you did and its not dual head, buy a cheaper PCI video card (something like a Radeon 7000, for example) and run your second monitor off it. That's the set up (PCI) that the IT did for me at work and it works pretty good. I would have preferred the dual-head AGP, but they went the other route and they make all the PC choices there.
 
Yes you can disable the Onboard Graphics on this board i know that for certain. You just go into the Bios and set the shared memory to 0 and that disables it.
 
Cheers cool for that monitor/graphics stuff.. kinda thought you would be able to disable onboard but nice to know exactly how.
Soz to hijack your thread with monitor stuff btw

So you can mix different memory as long as it is both ddr is that correct.. got some old sticks hanging around
 
You sure can. But if you have say PC3200 and stick a stick of PC2700 or lower in there the PC3200 will clock down and be restricted to the speed of your slowest Ram...I imagine it will come with PC2700 thou because thats the highest the board officially supports before overclocking...

That board only has 2 Dim slots btw so if your PC comes with 2 sticks of 256Mb in it you wont be able to add any more Ram. It can take 2Gig of Ram total(2 1Gig Sticks).
 
Cheers for that.. pretty sure that it comes with the one stick of 512. It seems a bit poor on memory specs this particular board.
I was thinking if the graphics cards behaved in the same way as the memory, thought that I had heard somewhere that that was the case..
 
Not really. It just doesnt have the fine tuning options as stated above, but that can be changed with just a Bios upgrade and its not that important anyway. I think theres some software available that lets you tweak options that arent actually available in your Bios, Powerstrip i think its called. I'm not a 100% on it, i'll have to check it out.
Its a MicroATX Board, very small, thats why it only comes with 2 Dimm Slots. The average seems to be about 3 Dimms these days from all the boards i've seen. 2Gig of Memory is more than enough anyway imo. I think anything above 1Gig even is just being greedy :D
What i'd do if i was you is flog the older DDR on Ebay or summat and invest in a new single stick of PC3200 512MB DDR then. There is very little difference in price with PC2700 and PC3200. I got a stick of 512MB Kingston PC3200 for £40 off Ebay just last week.

Well i aint had no problems with Vid Card Performance believe me! I've had some great results in 3D Mark for my card.
 
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Yeah I agree.. 1 gig is plenty no matter what grade ram it is.
Sure the board will be fine for me.
I am not really after too much from it really just nice to try and get it up around the 3 gig mark if poss. But I will get the bios upgrade for sure....
Are you using the onboard or did you disable it vga I mean ?
 
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