Locked Duron 1.0Ghz: set mem to 200 or 266?

I am setting up a home computer for a friend. It will be used mostly for internet and homework, with light gaming by the kids. It's an older mobo with at KT266 chipset (not KT266A). He has one stick of DDR266 ram. The bios lets me set the memory to HCLK (200Mhz) or SPD (266Mhz). I have heard a lot about not running the memory asynch with the cpu, so I'm not sure if I should keep the memory at HCLK or SPD. I've tried it both ways and it seems to work fine both ways. I haven't done extensive testing, so I'm not sure if stability will be a factor.

Any thoughts?

I don't think it will make a difference as the mem will be bottlenecked by the fsb or processor bus if you set it to 266. My advice would be to set the speed to sync with the processor bus and see if you can reduce the cas latency of the mem to 2.0 from 2.5. That would provide a boost in performance greater than running the mem at a higher frequency than the fsb. Another option is see if the chip will run at a 133 fsb in sync with the ram. Since it is not your computer I would only do this if the chip will run stable with no voltage increase at all. this suggestion would lead to the best performance and is certainly possible.

Thanks, that was the first thing I tried.

CPU won't hit 1333 even overvolted, so I'm giving him a minor overclock of 1050Mhz (woohoo, DDR210!). Memtest86 reports timing at 2.0-2-2-5. Should be good enough for him.

Thanks for the reply.

yup thats your best bet.

He oughta get a duron applebred 1.4 and sell the morgan 1.0...the applebred will OC a lot more without upping the VCore..just checkout the CPU database.

My guess: 1.4 FSB200 -> 1.87 FSB266 at least, if not higher

Average listed was 2.33, so I'm being quite conservative here.

Of course, for the average user, 1050 MHz vs 1867 MHz isn't that important It would only be a tad slower than a barton2500 at stock.

The nice thing about Morgan 1GHz durons is thatthey are easy to unlok with just a #2 pencil.

But it's no good doing a mere 50 MHz OC at default VCore...you might as well not OC and keep the warranty.

Guys,

It's not my computer, or I'd be overclocking it as much as I could. It's going to a family of fairly computer-illiterate people, so stability is the primary concern. I just popped it up to 1050Mhz because I know it's not enough to affect the PCI/AGP busses and it officially gets the cpu above 1Ghz. At default settings it's actually running at something like 998.1Mhz.