RAM clock different from fsb?

[drowned]

I've a Tyan Trinity 400, and I was messing around with my BIOS today and I noticed it's got a setting whereby I can set the clock speed of the RAM to one of three things: Host clock, host clock -33, or host clock +33. I've never heard of this kind of setting in this forum before, but it seems to me that such a thing would be rather useful....... say you set your fsb to 150, and your RAM is giving you problems, just set it to "host clock -33", and it'll run at 117?

Is this as big a deal as it sounds, or is this a common bios setting that I've simply been overlooking?

 

[WillysNut]

It sure is a big deal depending on what type of processor you have and as you menitoned, if you've got bum memory or your running a really high FSB.

I have a nice stick of PC100 in a Celeron box. I'm running the processor bus at 83mhz but the memory is running at hostclk+33m so my memory run's at 116Mhz...helps the performance of the box a lot!!

 

[outhouse]

Yes its a common setting but very useful i'm running at 167FSB and if i did not have my memory set at minus clock speed i would never be able to overclock so high without buying better memory that could handle the high FSB in the future i do plan to buy new memory and who knows maybe i will get lucky and i will be able to run with plus clock speed if i get away with that my bandwidth will be much better, just incase you dont know you can get SiSandra for free and it has a memory benchmark that is very useful.

goodluck

 

[Phil]

the +33mhz option doesn't make that much of a differance on intel systems as the front side bus strangles performance, on amd systems though due to the ddr front side bus it can be very useful