Does FSB Matter?

[hawk16]

Does front side bus matter? I was talking with a few people and they told me that FSB does not matter, im having a hard time believing this. Because i've heard of the CPU choking a high end video card because of front side bus, but im not really sure if this is true or not either. Can you please verify all this for me.

 

[Cogman]

This might more appropriately belong in the CPU Board, though it is borderline HT.

Yes, FSB does indeed matter. Think of the FSB as a communications channel, if your CPU is working at uber fast speeds but can only say 2 words at a time, then it will be choked and limited in what it can say. However, in the case of the CPU choking the video card, it is not a case of the FSB being too low, but the CPU being too slow to give the video card enough information to work with. Really, it is only a fairly recent development with the 8800 GTX's

 

[Peter]

Yes it does "matter", in that it creates a performance bottleneck - the faster (and numerous) the processor cores, the more.

That's why AMD eliminated it in 2003 and why Intel will, if you believe the press, follow in 2009 - not before cranking their FSB architecture from Ridiculous to Ludicrous Speed.

 

[PlasmaBomb]

Yes FSB matters and can be a bottleneck. I went from dual dual (2.33 GHz) xeons to dual quad (2.33 GHz) xeons and only got a 55% performance increase- I'm guessing that they became bandwidth starved...

 

[Steve]

Originally posted by: Peter
That's why AMD eliminated it in 2003 and why Intel will, if you believe the press, follow in 2009 - not before cranking their FSB architecture from Ridiculous to Ludicrous Speed.

I hope they go plaid!

 

[mechBgon]

Topic moved from Highly Technical to CPUs and Overclocking.

AnandTech Moderator
mechBgon