What are GAT and PAT?

Sorry if this has been covered, I searched it but only found alot of threads that mentioned turning it on or off...no real explanantions that I could find.

TIA,

AC

Its a setting on intel boards that tweaks the memroy timings.

Thats it? Ok. Most people do this manually dont they? What would be the benefit of using it?

thanks,
AC

Performance Acceleration Technology is a feature of the Intel 875 chipset which was "supposed" to be part of what made the 875P faster than the 865PE chipset. Abit was the first, I think, that figured out how to make the same thing happen on the 865 chipset based boards (much to Intel's ire). They called it Game Accelerator Technology or GAT (not very veiled was it). It basically speeds up the memory process by taking some short cuts, the result being that in many cases, the 865 boards are as fast or faster than the more expensive 875 based boards with native PAT. It wasn't long before all of the other major board makers had figured out how to make it work on their boards, as well. Reverse Engineering, anyone?

For more info, go find you one of last summer's reviews of the then new chipsets. Here is a link to a review of the IS7 at TechReport which discusses GAT:

http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2003q3/abit-is7/index.x?pg=1

Good article. It explained alot.

Thanks
AC

Happy to assist. I think I'm going to change my name to the "Librarian". I've got all these articles running through my head and I'm always linking to them in forum posts. Most of the time I remember where they came from, but sometimes it just takes a while for it to percolate to the top. That one (yours) was easy for some reason and I knew exactly where to go to find it.