Does high FSB matters anymore?

In the older days, it makes a lot of difference running on higher FSB. Technology has advanced rapidly so these days, does it matter to run on a "lower multi + high FSB" compared to "higher multi + lower FSB" on our C2D/C2Q?

Personally I don't feel a lot of difference except for some nicer benchmark scores which doesn't make huge impact on daily usage. If 450x9 is good enough then I wouldn't want to spend more on highly overclockable RAMs to do 533x7.5.

Suggestions anyone?

Hello again

I would allways spend money on FASTER RAM , since for gaming, for example, memory bandwith is a bottleneck.

FSB/Multi combinations are important nowdays, in terms of stability. there are mobos / cpus that go unstable easier on high FSB, so having lower fsb higher multi makes things easier..........

I have found from research and reading, that running RAM at faster MHz, even loosing timings a bit, adds overall performance to the rig (read/w times , t access, mem bandwith,etc).

for example, you can read this. His conclusion is that is not worth it, but the results are there.
In my case, the gain is bigger.

nice points

i reckon it's no big deal. i've seen ppl running E8500s with 600FSB and 7 multi. then there's other that go with 8X500 OR 9X450 for ~4ghz.

i think if you run higher FSB, your ram, NB and motherboard will deteriorate faster, as more info is going through these things. then if you run highre multi/lower FSB your CPU will deteriorate faster.

but performance wise, there's literally no visible difference. higher FSB (which means higher bandwidth ram) generates higher benchmark scores.

i think with C2D and C2Q, it's best to find right FSB/Multi combo which gives you the best tRD ram setting. there's a link at Anandtech explaining how that tRD RAM setting can boost performance.
this also links to a setting in the BIOS. can't remember what it's called :banghead:

EDIT: OH YEH! it's called FSB Strap.

here's the Anandtech link
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3208&p=7

Hey ibitato, hi again, lol.
Hi Rich'[ard]

Thanks for your inputs. I believe newer CPU's like C2D doesn't have so much of bottleneck hence high FSB would only give better benchmark scores but not necessarily in real life usage. If we're talking about -ns, it really isn't worth the time and even if it's 1 second, I wouldn't mind waiting.

Btw, I'm on a Foxconn Mars and it doesn't have FSB Strap. I believe many mobo doesn't have that settings too.

Rich'[ard] said:

i think with C2D and C2Q, it's best to find right FSB/Multi combo which gives you the best tRD ram setting. there's a link at Anandtech explaining how that tRD RAM setting can boost performance.

Click to expand...

Being there , done that
Its really hard to come out of it, plus you need a good mobo that lets you play in that ground.
In my case, after doing extensive tests , I found that with my FSB (450x8) the best overall perf its a 1080Mhz RAM , tRD 5.
Funny thing, if y trust this (out of some ppl benches on my mobo) :

By ibitato at 2009-04-30

I whould be doing WORST than I am.... I bet my RAM is waaaaaaayyyy better than the one they used to test

I personally run with a higher FSB as my system will then run at the higher speed

I know the numbers look better in benches but the speed is hardly to be felt? Btw, if I have 3 x 2GB in my rig (6GB in total), does it still run dual channel?

If its DDR2, its DDR2

I thought we always need a pair of two? Since I have 2 + 1 now, I'm not sure if it matters, lol.

Cuiiey said:

I personally run with a higher FSB as my system will then run at the higher speed

Click to expand...

go benchmark your PC =p
i bet there's no diff between higher FSB lower Multi and lower FSB higher multi...well not much anyway.

aoch88, your RAM should be TRI channel.

Thanks Rich'[ard] but I'm using a P35 so DDR is the furthest I could get. I just don't want 3 sticks to screw up things and get single data rate