Dealing with Memory Speeds / Frequencies
When the memory frequency runs at the same speed as the FSB, it is said to be running in synchronous operation. When memory and FSB are clocked differently (lower or higher than), it is known to be in asynchronous mode. On both AMD and Intel platforms, the most performance benefits are seen when the FSB of the processor is run synchronously with the memory – Although Intel based systems have a slight exception, this is completely true of all AMD-supporting chipsets. When looking at the AMD-supporting chipsets async modes are to be avoided like a plague. AMD-supporting chipsets offer less flexibility in this regard due to poorly implemented async modes. Even if it means running our memory clock speed well below the maximum feasible for a given memory, an Athlon XP system will ALWAYS exhibit best performance running the memory in sync with the FSB. Therefore, a 166FSB Athlon XP would run synchronously with DDR333/PC2700 (2*166) and give better performance than running with DDR400/PC3200, despite its numbers being bigger.
Only Intel chipsets have implemented async modes that have any merit. If you are talking about the older i845 series of chipsets, running an async mode that runs the memory faster than the FSB is crucial to top system performance. And with the newer dual channel Intel chipset (i865/875 series) in an overclocked configuration, often you must run an async mode that runs the memory slower than the FSB for optimal results. The async modes in SiS P4 chipsets also work correctly.
To achieve synchronous operation, there is usually a Memory Frequency or DRAM ratio setting in the bios of your system that will allow you to manipulate the memory speed to a either a percentage of the FSB (i.e. 100%) or a fraction (or ratio) i.e. N/N where N is any integer available to you. If you want to run memory at non 1:1 ratio speeds, motherboards use dividers that create a ratio of CPU FSB: memory frequency. However, intrinsically, it is possible to see the problem with this and why synchronous operation is preferable on all PC platforms. If there is divider, then there is going to be a gap between the time that data is available for the memory, and when the memory is available to accept the data (or vica versa). There will also be a mismatch between the amount of data the CPU can send to the memory and how much the memory can accept from the CPU. This will cause slowdowns as you will be limited by the slowest component.
Here are three examples illustrating the three possible states of memory operation:
* 200MHz FSB speed with 100% or 1:1 (FSB:Memory ratio) results in 200MHz memory speed (DDR400)
Such a configuration is wholly acceptable for any AMD system, memory should be set this way at all times for best performance. Asynchronous FSB/Memory Speeds are horridly inefficient on AMD systems, but may well be the optimal configuration for P4 systems.
* 200MHz FSB speed with 120% or 5:6 (FSB:Memory ratio) results in 240MHz memory speed (DDR480)
This example shows running the memory at higher asynchronous speeds. Assume we have a Barton 2500+ which by default is running at a FSB of 333 MHz (166 MHz X 2) and we also have PC3200 memory which by default is running at 400 MHz. This is a typical scenario because many people think that faster memory running at 400 MHz, will speed up their system. Or they fail to disable the SPD or Auto setting in their bios. There is NO benefit at all derived from running your memory at a higher frequency (MHz) than your FSB on Athlon XP/Duron sytems. In actuality, doing so has a negative effect.
Why does this happen? It happens because the memory and FSB can't "talk" at the same speeds, even though the memory is running at higher speeds than the FSB. The memory would have to "wait for the FSB to catch up", because higher async speeds forces de-synchronization of the memory and FSB frequencies and therefore increases the initial access latency on the memory path -- causing as much as a 5% degradation in performance.
This is another ramification of the limiting effect of the AMD dual-pumped FSB. A P4's quad pumped FSB (along with the superior optimization of the async modes) allows P4's to benefit in some cases from async modes that run the memory faster than the FSB. This is especially true of single channel P4 systems. There still are synchronization losses inherent in an async mode on any system, but the adequate FSB bandwidth of the P4 allows the additional memory bandwidth produced by async operation to overcome these losses and produce a net gain.
* 250MHz FSB speed with 80% or 5:4 (FSB:Memory ratio) results in 200MHz memory speed (DDR400)
This example is most often used in overclocking situations where the memory is not able to keep up with the speed of the FSB. On AMD platforms, there is really no point having a high FSB, if the memory can’t keep up. When the memory or any other component is holding back system performance, this is called a “bottleneck”. As in the example above, a memory bottleneck would be if you were running your memory at DDR400 MHz with a 500 MHz (250x2) system bus. The memory would only be providing 3.2GB/s of bandwidth while the bus would be theoretically capable of transmitting 4.0GB/s of bandwidth. A situation like this would not help overall system performance.
Think of it like this; let's say you had a highway going straight into a mall, with an identical highway going straight out of the mall. Both highways have the same number of lanes and initially they have the same 45mph speed limit. Now let's say that there's a great deal of traffic flowing in and out of the mall and in order to get more people in and out of the mall quicker, the department of transportation agrees to increase the speed limit of the highway going into the mall from 45mph to 70mph; the speed limit of the highway leaving the mall is still stuck at 45mph. While more people will be able to reach the mall quicker, there will still be a bottleneck in the parking area leaving the mall - since the increased numbers of people that are able to get to the mall still have to leave at the same rate. This is equivalent to increasing the FSB frequency but leaving the memory frequency/bandwidth unchanged or set to a slower speed. You're speeding up one part of the equation while leaving the other part untouched. Sometimes the fastest memory is not always afforded or available. In this case, more focus should be placed on balancing the FSB and memory frequencies while still keeping latencies as low as possible AND while still maintaining CPU clock speed (GHz) by increasing the multiplier. The benefit of a faster FSB (and higher bandwidth) will only become more and clearer as clock speeds (GHz) increase; the faster the CPU gets, the more it will depend on getting more data quicker. The only real benefit of async modes on AMD platforms is the fact that it comes in handy to overclockers for testing purposes; to determine their max FSB and to eliminate the memory as a possible cause for not being able to achieve a desired stable FSB speed. Even so, async modes on early nforce2 based motherboards caused many problems; problems as serious as bios corruption.
Looking to the Intel side of the fence, async modes that run the memory slower than the FSB have merit because of how async modes are implemented in the Intel chipsets. This is extremely important, as we cannot change the CPU multiplier on modern Intel systems and therefore have to use and async mode to allow substantial overl!!!!! on the majority of systems utilizing the current 200/800MHz fsb family of P4 processors. To illustrate, if you increase the FSB on a new C stepped P4 to 250 MHz (250 x 4) with a 1:1 ratio, memory will work at 250 MHz (DDR500). This can be done in two ways. The first is with exotic PC4000 or DDR500 memory modules, but these are expensive just to run synchronously at such speeds and their timings are exactly delightful either. The other way is to overclock DDR400/DDR433 to much higher speeds through overvolting, but this is seemingly dangerous and often motherboards don’t provide nearly enough voltage to achieve such speeds without physical voltage mods. Therefore to avoid expensive PC4000 or volt mods, you change the memory ratio so that a 250FSB overclock will become something that the memory can handle to allow for a substantial overclock of the Pentium 4. In the example, to let PC3200(DDR400) remain as DDR400 with a 250MHz.
