2gb @ 2.4ghz or 1gb @ 2.6ghz

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Kung Lau

Golden Member
Oct 13, 1999
1,001
6
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I'm not sure if the jump to 2gb of ram was worth it. I have 2x512 Mushkin XP 3200 (2-2-2-6) and my A64 3700 o/c'ed to 2585 (235x11 @ 2-3-3-6) rock stable forever. I bought the Corsair memory from the Hot Deal last week for $157-40mir and tried my luck at o/cing the ram. I knew that I would not get the lowest latencies with the Corsair sticks but didn't know how much I could push the memory either with 1:1 running. The best I could seem to get was 220x11 @ 2.5-3-3-8. This is with mem at 2.75.

I'm not entirely sure if the divider would allow me to keep the ram on lower 2-3-3-6 latencies and still raise the memory bus.

So far I haven't seen much advantage of the 2gb over 1gb of the super low LL stuff o/c'ed.

Any suggestions to boost more performance from the 2x1gb sticks?

 
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Ike0069

Diamond Member
Apr 28, 2003
4,276
2
76
Other than voltage, there are no ways to increase the speed of your RAM. Have you tried to get back to 235x11 using the 166 divider. That puts you at 195, and you could possibly lower the timings also.

If you play games such as WoW, FEAR, or BF2, 2GB is a definite plus.

 
K

Kung Lau

Golden Member
Oct 13, 1999
1,001
6
81
Funny thing is I'm about to leave WoW due to raiding nausea and since the "fun" has worn off for me, finally. But I thought the extra ram would come in handy. I tried only 333 and had to raise the CAS to 2.5 to get 240, but this crashed in prime95. Will try some more variations.
 
K

Kung Lau

Golden Member
Oct 13, 1999
1,001
6
81
Hmmm, am up to 245 on the corsair at 2.75v and 1.45 vcore. Will do more testing. I guess I'm just not noticing the difference yet but now I'm at 2.7ghz on my XP 120 and 48C on prime95 running.

 
K

Kung Lau

Golden Member
Oct 13, 1999
1,001
6
81
Originally posted by: bunnyfubbles
Yeah, uh, use the dividers.
Click to expand...


Yea, guess the comprimise is gonna be somewhere between high bandwidth and low latencies. I'm trying to weigh in the performance advantage of doubling my ram at the cost of raising my latency from 2-3-3-6 to 2.5-3-3-8. Guess it's a small hit for going from 1gig to 2gig. I was just concerned that because I had to reduce the FSB from 240 to 220 at 1:1 (200) I would take another performance hit.

How bad is using the divider of a performance hit?

Currently I'm at the highest O/C yet, but I've raised CAS and used the mem divider.

Previously I was holding back on raising the FSB beyond what 2-2-2-5 would let me, but I gave in to 2-3-3-6 when ~220FSB wasn't cutting it with the total cpu overclock.

I guess I never did push what this cpu could do before "maxing" out the cpu speed. I'm liking this 2.7ghz so far, even if it's at 2.5-3-3-8.



 
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Ike0069

Diamond Member
Apr 28, 2003
4,276
2
76
Very small pefromance hit with a divider. And since a faster CPU is always better than faster RAM, dividers actually give you a performance boost when they allow you a higher CPU clock.
 
K

Kung Lau

Golden Member
Oct 13, 1999
1,001
6
81
Ok, overnight Prime95 with no errors so far...


Going to try some real world tests now.
 
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bunnyfubbles

Lifer
Sep 3, 2001
12,248
3
0
Yes, you have to remember that CPU speed is king, the difference between value ram and high end ram that costs $100-200 more is often only 1-5%. Especially with AMD's current CPUs and their integrated memory controller, they're in no way bandwidth hungry. This isn't like the days of Intel and their bandwidth starved P4s, where your best bet for performance was sticking as close as possible to a 1:1 ratio with your CPU FSB and your ram (and getting the ram as fast as possible with less regard to latency). Current Athlons (especially singlecore) even tend to prefer lower latency, so you might not be trading off much memory performance at all if you're sacrificing higher bandwidth for lower latency.

And in terms of 2GB vs. 1GB, some cases you simply can't perform the tasks without the extra amount of ram. It won't matter how fast your ram is, once your system starts accessing the PF memory from your hard drive, you're going to have massive performance loss (if you've disabled PF, then you could be in for some trouble).

If you don't run any programs that would really benefit from more memory (multitasking, photo/video editing, some games alone) then maybe you should stick with the higher performing memory, although it probably won't equate to more tangible performance, it would be good for boasting and possibly setting records - although I doubt that either is your goal.

I've been running with dividers such as 2:3 and 7:10 (RAM:HTT) on my single core 3000+ and my dualcore 165 (both 9x multis and lower) and benchmarks have always put my system right up there with systems using 1:1 RAM:HTT, any performance advantage being negligible.
 
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Munky

Diamond Member
Feb 5, 2005
9,372
0
76
Aside from lowering the mem clocks, there's no performance hit from dividers on the A64, and likewise, there's nothing gained from sticking with 1:1 besides higher mem clocks. All the memory ratios run off a CPU frequency divider, so technically there's no such thing as a 1:1 ratio in a A64 system.
 
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dguy6789

Diamond Member
Dec 9, 2002
8,558
3
76
2.4Ghz with 2GB of ram would completely crush a system with 2.6Ghz and 1GB of ram.

A 1.8Ghz AMD64 with 2GB of ram in Battlefield 2 will be faster than a 3Ghz AMD64 with 1GB of ram. Fear also benefits from more than 1GB of ram. Oblivion may as well but I do not know for sure because I have not had the misfortune of running Oblivion with a machine with less than 2GB of memory.

There is no processor in existance that is fast enough to make a game smooth when it is swapping memory for harddrive.

Run your machine with 1GB of ram at 2.6Ghz and play a game for an hour. Then run it at 2.4Ghz with 1GB of memory and play the game for an hour. It does not matter what you do, you will not notice any difference between 2.6 and 2.4Ghz of processor speed. There is no reason to sacrifice an entire gigabyte of memory for a nonexistant speed boost that has no more than a placebo effect.
 
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