Welcome to Overclockers Forums! Join us to reply in threads, receive reduced ads, and to customize your site experience!
Dual channel or single channel mode in nforce2 mb is not that crucial for overall performance. The difference is only few % (say 2-3%) at most. Also single channel may let FSB to go a bit higher due to a smaller chance of potential dual dimm mismatch and memory controller stress at high FSB, I think. On the other hand, dual channel memory controller provides some performance advantage due to its intrinsic speculative caching capability. At this point, the little higher FSB from single channel offset the performance advantage of dual channel, and the two is about a tie
Hehe...not for all of us . But in all seriousness, I believe that its often quote possible, even desirable, that one has a good idea of the logical limits and capabilities of all of their hardware, even before the FedEx truck comes by. It is imperative to have an understanding like this, and this can be greatly aided by browsing these very forums. For example, one should not be expecting to hit 2.7ghz on a Volcano7+. On the other hand, one should realize that an Abit NF7-S can provide a far higher fsb than 170mhz. It took a me an incredibly short amount of time to reach 2.5ghz with my setup, mainly due to knowing the maximum speed of my memory, and of looking at past experiences of my identical processor. Research, research, research!Overclocking is a process, not by sudden boosting the Vcore and hope it will go to 2.5 GHz.
Gautam said:
Not quite. The performance gained by dual channel even on nForce2 mobo's is around 12-15%. That is to say, that someone running a dual channel setup in 200mhz could match the bandwidth provided by 230mhz in single channel. I've seen people with slower front side buses than mine crush my bandwidth. My advice would be to go dual channel for sure. Even though it almost always limits your front side bus/memory bus overclock, the added bandwidth is well worth it. If this doesn't make your jaw nearly touch the floor, I don't know what will.
...
Gautam said:Actually, I'm slightly mistaken. Those results don't quite prove my point, so I'll concede that 12-15% is overshooting it quite a bit. I actually got that number by comparing my memory bandwidth with the results that [OC]This got in ]this thread. The image no longer shows, but he exceeded 3600mb/sec with 220mhz in dual channel, whereas I barely cross 3200mb/sec. This is around a 12% increase. My efficiency is around 90%, his eerily above 100%. That xtremesystems thread is not an adequate representation, as many of those posts are from pre-C1 northbridge stepping times. Almost all of them are with Epoxes, which, I think, fall short of the Abit NF7 in memory bandwidth. I've seen a few other results from dual channel users that have, although I apologize for being unable to give you exact numbers. Again, I've got nothing definite here, but there are people that get around 600 more 3dmarks than me(my score is around 14400) with identically clocked and configured systems. The only difference that I can find is dual channelI'm going to try to see if I can borrow a stick of 256mb from a friend to see what kinds of improvements it yields. Due to the discrepancies caused by different northbridge steppings, latencies, etc., this is probably the only way to find out. I believe the actual amount gained with all of this taken into consideration will turn out to be around 10%. 15% is overshooting it, but I think that 2-3% is a bit conservative, also.
94% in single channel is very very nice, btw. I get only 90.666% myself, and this appears to be the norm. Even by using those xtremesystems results, the efficiency appears to increase by around 5-7%, but I think that with the identical system, gains will be far higher than this.
are ublocked from the factory
That number 3600 MB/s at 220 MHz is probably wrong. Since at 220 MHz, the max bandwidth is 220 x 2 x 8 = 3520 MB/s which is less than 3600 MB/s !!!