Memory timings??

[Rayit]

I've read "Searching for the Memory Holy Grail 1 & 2" I'm interested in getting the best performance. Do memory sticks come with set timings that you can modify?? CAS Latency seems to be the most important, is that right?? Do you just bump them, little by little and one at a time or nudge them all up a notch together?? Also I suppose you have to bump up the voltage little by little too. I'm planning on a new dual-channel system with ASUS P4P800 deluxe and P4 2.4C CPU and would like to maybe overclock to 1000 FSB and 1000 Sys.Bus speeds. Am thinking the OCZ Gold PC3700 for memory as the reviews from those articles indicate it's quite good memory. I haven't seen much about messing with the memory timings so any feedback would be apreciated. Also about dual channel: I'm not clear if using 4X256 or 2X256 was the difference in the 1st article. One has double the MB of memory so wouldn't that effect the system's performance?? Or is it just the type/speed and not so much the total amount of memory?? Thanks, Rayit

 

[VTJoeK]

I am doing a similar thing. I also read the same articles. Check out the sytem i am going to buy. I noticed that in the first article it didn't make much difference between 4 and 2 so I went with 2. The Geil PC4000 memory wasn't much more and outperformed the PC3700 memory. That's why I chose it. Take a look.

Ignoring the AMD line of thought, I decided to build a Pentium machine. I have $1500 that can only be used for building a machine. It has been a while since my last build so I am a little out of date with technology, but it seems that $1500 gives me some room to get past that. My machine is below.

Processor Pentium 4 2.4 GHz 800 MHz FSB overclocked to 1000 MHz 169
Motherboard Asus P4C800-E 180
CPU Cooler Thermalright SLK-900U 120mm adjustable-speed Vantec Tornado 65
RAM GeIL Platinum 1GB 1024MB Kit ( 2x512MB ) PC-4000 DDR 500MHz CAS 2.5 retail Model 330
Hard Drive Maxtor ATA133 60 GB Drive from home computer 0
Video Card ATI RADEON 9800 Pro 128MB DDR DUAL HEAD TV OUT/DVI AGP 295
DVD Burner DRU510A, CD-ROM/CD-R(W)/DVR-ROM/DVD±R(W) 190
Floppy Disk From home Computer 0
Key board From home Computer
Mouse From home Computer
Sound Card Integrated 0
Case Antec SX630II 72
Power Supply Included with case
Speakers From home Computer 0


Total before monitor is 1301 I believe. This is without a monitor though. We have a 21" CRT that does fine, but it is old and is not very crisp. My wife is all about style and cares nothing about performance only whether it is LCD or not. Is there a 17" LCD monitor that will be suitable for some FPS without breaking my bank? I have been looking at the NEC LCD7V, ViewSonic VA720, and the Hitachi CML174 - 440. Ranging in price and performance it seems. Does anyone have any experience with these displays? Also, please critique my system in places where I am lacking power or I have too much power. What is my limiting reagent? Is it a balanced machine?



Thanks for your input.



Joe

 

[egale]

For Dual channel the important thing is that the sticks of memory match. There are also problems getting dual channel to run when you have 4 sticks rather than two.

As for memory timings, your motherboard will have a setting SPD which automatically gets the settings from the memory. This probably won't give you the fastest settings though. You can use a utility called CPU-Z which will tell you what the settings are.

You can tighten the settings little by little if you do it manually and eventually the system will fail. Hopefully, resetting the bios will allow you to go back in and change the settings. There is always the possibility that you will corrupt the bios. The P4c800-e automatically reloads the bios from the CD if this happens.

Of course your greatest performance gain will be overclocking the fsb. My guess is that you will never get to a 1000 fsb with any ram. The motherboard and/or processor will fail long before you reach it.

And as far as memory voltage goes, you can set it at 2.75 right away. Any higher then you may damage the ram.

 

[VTJoeK]

Check out http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.html?i=1849
They did a pretty extensive article on new RAM which allows 1000Mhz FSB. It should handle the configuration fine. And I agree that with that bus speed the memory timings should not be an issue.