FSB and Memory Frequency

This question might be a bit newbish, but I'm relatively new to overclocking.

I ended up buying Crucial PC-2700 RAM (2 x 512) for my 8RDA+ board. I'm running an XP2700+ processor and at the time I wasn't planning on doing any overclocking, so I just bought what I figured I was going to be running at.

Since then, I've decided to play around a bit with OCing, but I've been trying to use the 2700 RAM that I have. In the BIOS, there is a setting that allows you to set the FSB frequency and the Memory frequency separately. When I set my FSB to 200 and leave my memory frequency at auto, it says that my memory is running at 166 MHz. I was able to get the machine to post at those settings just fine and I did manage to run Prime95 at those settings for more than 24 hours. In fact, I ran with these settings for several days and never noticed any problems. I thought I was in the clear until I recently decided to play some WC3 and I started getting errors that seemed to be related to memory. I finally downloaded memtest86 and tried doing those tests, but memtest86 locked my machine up hard. So, I'm back down to running at 166 for both my FSB and my memory.

My question is what's the deal here? Is my memory really not running at those lower speeds like it seems to indicate. What does it mean when my FSB is running at 200 MHz and my memory is running at 166 MHz then? I'm guessing I'm stuck until I want to plop down another $200 for 3200+ memory. I'm curious about the settings more than anything else.

What Epox board do you have? I know with my 8RDA you can set the ram's MHz at a setting. I have some Patriot and Samsung PC2700 in my rig thats running @ 166MHz and they both have been run at up to 190Mhz and I didnt try higher. Since you got Crucial you should be able to go with a 166MHz RAM speed.. you should post the settings you ram it at tho to make it easy for others to help.

I have the 8RDA+. My BIOS says that my memory is running at 166 MHz when the FSB is at 200.

But memtest86 crashes when running at 166/200 and not when it's running at 166/166. That's what is puzzling me at the moment. Other than memtest86 and Warcraft 3, the system has no other problems running at 166/200. I can run Prime95 for hours and hours at 166/200.