333mhz fsb Athlon performance pulled down bad

[Xtasy]

I have Asus A7A266, with an ali magik 1 chipset. Yes yes i know, it sucks, but i got it for free. With a 1200 mhz (200 mhz fsb) athlon t-bird, i was able to max out the mobo overclocking and hit 333mhz fsb (8.5 x 166) = 1416mhz. And not only that, i'm running sync cpu::mem with samsung pc2700 @ fastest timings. Sadly, the memory performance is really low, only 1700 mb/s! It gets beat by all the other athlon ddr chipsets @ ddr 266! Should this be or is the memory actually running at a lower speed. I can't tell the clock of the memory bus since it's an asus board that blocks the reading of certain things. And i do know the bad memory performance of the ali magik 1. If 1700mb/s is all i could get out of a 333mhz fsb athlon with pc2700 memory @ 333mhz cas2, then this chipset is a joke. I wish i had a rev b or c chipset.

 

[rogue1979]

One of my rigs is running a Duron 1.2@1314MHz on a 146MHz fsb on the old Iwill KA266. At 292MHz DDR speeds I have some Crucial PC2100 scoring 1800/1700. Not the greatest, but still not bad and the thing is absolutely rock stable and trouble free. Not one bit of pickiness on set up or installing different devices, unlike the much faster KT266A I tried and got tired of the Via glitches. I have 5 machines running in the house now, and in my old age I have come to value stability much more than speed. I mean really to put it in perspective you really won't notice the few fps in games, but you sure do notice when your rig has problems.😉

 

[Freshbrain]

Well, I must say stability is the most important thing also, but, anyway, 1700MB/s is still too bad for 333fsb, even for the Ali Magik 1, if you check with sandra, it has the "reference" bench for that chipset and PC2100 cas2 scoring 1800. So, 333 should at least get 2000 or more.

Maybe your board is using another multipliers/dividers when hitting 166mhz FSB. I mean, instead of runing the memory at the same speed of FSB (1:1) (333) it gets a 4/5 multiplier and you are gettin 266 for memory again. Try for example with 165FSB and see what happens. And how about results with 133FSB???, your scores seem much like 133FSB ones.

You could also try an updated bios.

If any of the above, sell your mobo for $60, and go get an ECS SIS 635 chipset mobo for about $60 also, much better, Sound and Lan included. A friend of mine has one oced to 160FSB and gets 2100 Sandra mem scores.

 

[Xtasy]

I'm not sure anyone would buy it for $60 though. More like $40. I flashed the mobo to the latest, and i have all the timings on fastest, but this mobo is out of date with the current settings such as (safe/normal/turbo/ultra) but i have it at 2/2/2/2/6 and all increased timings options enabled. Could it be that it is on dimm2 and not dimm1? This is because the heatsink clip blocks dimm1.