lowtimings or higher fsb

hello guys im in need of some help

i have been wanting to switch back to AMD for a long time now and to be honest i have been out of the loop for a lil while.............i currently have a 2.8p4 at 3.5 back when i built my intel system timmings were not as important as achiving a high fsb.....now addays im seeing everyone just buying pc3200 with AMD and logically i was thinking wait a minute should'nt everyone be buying better ram like pc 4400 etc?..............

i know my question is not worded very well but can anyone help me out.......im getting ready 2 make the swicth and im trying 2 decide between some low timing pc3200 or worse timmed pc 4000 or higher.........

thanks in advance

Well, depending on how much you overclock, and how high the FSB will be....Most likely, the Higher Overclock/high FSB will offset The low Timings.

a Question like this was asked before.

What FSB's are you trying to push?

i'm running 3-5-4-11, not great timings, but i'm pushing 260 FSB. For me the High FSB Countracts the high Timings. That and i prefer a High FSB.

it depends if u keep the cpu the same speed but just use a ratio ie 5/4 with tight timings vs loose timings at 1-1, it will be very much the same. however if u are slowing down the cpu to get tighter timings, it will generally will cost u alot more performance than u will get..cpu speed counts about 4 times as compared to memory speed.

ohhh thats what i was leaning towards...........so ur saying in other words.........buy some pc 4400 before buying fast 3200



???

thanks again

With the A64, there's no reason not to use a divider. The way the memory controller is set up, the RAM frequency is always set by a divider from the CPU and always runs asynchronously. "1:1" simply indicates the ratio between 200MHz and the CPU clock at default HTT for each multiplier. This is obviously NOT 1:1. It's usually about 1:10, and running RAM and CPU at this ratio provides no magical benefits.

With the current memory controller, lower latency generally beats a higher frequency as long as you use a divider to allow the CPU to run at its best stable speed. However, the A64's memory controller works so well that memory is seldom a bottleneck, and even the best RAM won't improve real-world performance dramatically.

I found this thread very informative.
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=28&threadid=1475190&enterthread=y
It should help you get up to speed with the current technology.

Wow that is a very informative thread. Glad I read that.

hey otter awesome link.......................that was very informative..........maybe ill buy a faster proc with the money ill save


thanks

Yeah. I was thinking I'd need to spend $400 on RAM to overclock until I read that. How good it is to be wrong!

I'm going to be trying out my Corsair XMS pc4400 at 250 MHz and seeing what timings I can get. I'll run on the 166 divider so my CPU will be about 2700 MHz if it can handle it. Right now I'm at HTT 275, so my CPU as at about 2500 MHz. Do you think I'll have an overall performance gain if I drop my RAM by 25 MHz but also drop the timings and then increase my CPU by about 200 MHz? I kinda wish I bought some DDR500 memory with tighter timings now that I really understand whats going on mathematically in my rig. Hmm now that I typed this post I wanna try it out. Be back later with some results.