will running below spec make memory sad?

I am building this dual xeon system with 100MHz fsb chips, however people are clocking them over 200MHz fsb! But not all of them. And basically I am looking at the patriot tccd pc-3200, model Patriot PDC1G3200+XBLK. If my chips won't go 200MHz and I am stuck down at 160 MHz or whatever, will the memory still function properly? could running it this far below spec damage it some how? I really wanted to get this memory because in the future I will be able to upgrade to xeons chips that run at 200MHz stock. I wasn't sure if memory is happy running at any speed up to what it is rated at, or if it has a tight range of frequencies around it's rating. I thank you for your help!

Yes it would LOL. Its just like run your CPU at lower speed.

Dont worry about it

Running memory slower will not hurt them...you will be fine...matter of fact the memory will probably last even longer that way...

sweet, thanks guys

You can also run tighter timings so that the lower frequency doesn't create quite so much of a loss.

veryhumid said:

sweet, thanks guys

Click to expand...

But your memory will be sad and might want to talk about it.

that's fine, as long as it has 4 cores of folding running I am all ears

The memactually runs at 2-2-2-5 at 200Mhz so I can't go tighter on my motherboard anyway.

The only gotcha in this type of situation is that if you're putting a newer RAM on an older board, the older board might expect lower density RAM, so newer, faster RAM might not work by virtue of it's density, not it's speed. However in this particular situation it sounds like you're using a board that fully supports faster RAM, so you shouldn't have any issues.

Getting faster RAM than is immediately required, does have the advantage that it will probably run a little cooler and give you nicer system temps.

regards,

Road Warrior

the memory will certainly get very sad and if you don't watch it closely, it will hop out of your case, walk away and find a new owner, who treats it right .

I had the same thing happen to my V8 engine, that I put into a forklifter. lol

hehe, thanks for the combination of responses

BTW, it an asus board with a 875p chipset, it is just the cpus that are pretty dated.