? on an old A7m266-D

[McJudge]

Let me say first,
Hello all I am new to the forum!

Second I am new to overclocking so any leniency that can be provided to the absolute simplicity of this topic would be appreciated. I am pretty decent with computers and have built hundreds so my knowledge outside the realm of overclocking is fairly decent.

I have a A7m266-D with 2 AMD 1900+'s and will be upgrading to 2800+'s soon
2x PC2100 512mb Ecc Registered
Adaptec 29320 SCSI card
2x 18Gb USCSI320 15k rpm cheetah drives Raid 0 for my operating system
I am going to upgrade my video card to an Asus 6800 GT 256mb DDR3
The rest of the system specs to my knowledge are irrelevant to this topic (I think).

I am thinking when I get those upgrades that my ram might be a bottleneck. I looked on crucial.com to see what ram they offered for my motherboard. They offer all the way up to PC3200.

The manual says it doesn’t support anything over 2100. Now without overclocking will PC3200 ram give me any performance benefit excluding what I would be getting because its not ecc? From what I understand I would have to up the multiplier on my FSB to get it to run at the same speed with the ram. If I go watercooling and put a block on my motherboard chipset can I do that?

Thanks for your help ahead of time I really appreciate it.

 

[David]

Hi, and welcome to the forums!

With all the AMD 760MPx based boards (A7M266-D as well as the Tyan Tiger MPX, MSI K7D, Iwill MPX, etc) the FSB is very limited. PC2100 is the highest supported standard, but if you increase the FSB then faster RAM may help.

As these boards are older, the PCI and AGP buses increase as the FSB is increased. This means that getting an FSB past about 150MHz is difficult. Eg at 150MHz FSB your AGP bus is running at 75MHz (overclocked from 66MHz) and the PCI bus at 37.5MHz (overclocked from 33MHz). This can cause failed boots, instability and data corruption.

Most of the boards I mentioned allow FSB adjustments up to 150-200MHz apart from the Tyan board which does not allow any overclocking.

 

[McJudge]

Thanks for the help thats exactly what I was looking for.

My next question is would a MSI K8T Master2 with dual 240 (1.4 ghz) Opterons opterons and 1gb of PC3200 ram be a significant upgrade from the system with the upgrades above? I can't tell because the 2800+'s are rated at 2.133ghz.