Can anyone please clear this athlon 64 thing up for me

[otispunkmeyer]

hey i would like info or links to somewhere that will explain how exactly the A64 works

i really want to know about its FSB etc, becuase when i buy ram for my new A64 system i want to know wether 3200 will be enough

my friend has PC4000 in his rig, but i heard that u should use 3200 if your not overclocking which implies to me that 3200 ram is stock speed for the A64 there by meaning the FSB (if it has one) is also 200Mhz

but what if i didn just stick some pc4000 in an left it,? would i see extra performance..or would i have to in the bios an actually change the fsb speed my self to match the ram speed?

 

[DaNorthface]

you won't see any extra performance out of the pc4000 unless you overclock your cpu and ram - or change the timing on the ram. But even pc3200 should be enough to overclock with the A64.

 

[mamisano]

The current Athlon 64s are rated for a maximum of PC3200 Ram but you can run slower Ram using dividers. When you overclock the chip, and you use PC3200 Ram, you can either change the divider so the memory runs in spec, or overclock the memory as well. PC4000 will give you more headroom for overclocking but is NOT necessary.

 

[otispunkmeyer]

well im not really into overclockin........i jus like to stick stuff together and leave it

 

[otispunkmeyer]

so it really isnt worth the extra $$$ for faster than 3200 ram, unless i want to overclock

well guess thats setlled then.......and i can laugh at my friend who bought pc4000, and he doesnt overclock either so it was kinda a waste....but he does have the oppertunity if he reallly needs it

 

[DaNorthface]

even if you overclock, you probably don't need more than pc3200.. My PC2700 can do PC3500 easily with 2.7 volts and 2.5-3-3-11 timing

 

[otispunkmeyer]

i heard filling all 3 dimm slots reduces memory speed to 266 or 333 or something becuase the A64's memory controller cant handle it ?

 

[AnnoyedGrunt]

That is true on many motherboards. On other MB's, it doesn't seem to matter.

Either way, since 754 is single channel there is no point (other than cost) to buy 2X 512 instead of 1X 1GB. If you go with 939, which is dual channel, you'd be better off going with 2X 512, since it will help performance a bit (I'm guessing, I've never actually seen any tests of a 939 MB with only one stick of RAM that shows the performance gain from two sticks).

-D'oh!