Mobo-fsb-ddr400 question...

[WangoZ]

A friend has a bit of trouble with his system and asked this question on our Clan forum...Can anyone give us some insight on how this works??

"Does anyone know of a decent motherboard that will support a 533 FSB processor and DDR400 memory? I've been looking at Intel boards to replace this diseased Soyo board I have and all of them require 800 FSB processors to use my existing DDR400 (single channel) memory and my 3.06 Ghz / 533 FSB P4 HT processor.

I'm assuming that these motherboards that want 800 mhz FSB to run DDR400 will actually run it, just not at the optimum speed. Anyone know anything about this?"

Any help would be appreciated...

 

[bob4432]

most of the boards will just run the memory @ 320MHz and speed up the timings, which is just a memory divider which is done all the time when o/c. i just recently sold a 1.7GHz P4 system that had a i865PE based board (400/533/800FSB) and pc3200 ram. ven though it had pc3200 ram, it ran fine alhtought the cpu was only 400FSB, which kicked the memory down to that and increased timings.

this applies to both amd and intel boards, from my experience.

also, when he says "single channel" memory, inform him his memory is neithe single or dual channel, it is the memory controller that determines that. and you would need multiples of 2 sticks for any memory controller to make it dual channel, if that memory controller is able to.

for a m/b basically any i865pe based motherboard shold work fine, and can be picked up decently priced. here is a quick list, he can pick for the options he wants, but imo biostar, abit, asus, msi, gigabyte, intel all make good boards for P4s, just make sure he gets a i865pe based board because it has the best price/performing ratio chipset for his cpu.

 

[WangoZ]

Thanks for the help...Just what I was looking for!

 

[bob4432]

n/p

 

[cubby1223]

You'd want to run the memory at ddr333 speeds anyways. Run back through the old articles and you'll see that ddr400 slightly decreases performance versus ddr333 when the cpu is running at 166 or 133MHz clock.

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: cubby1223
You'd want to run the memory at ddr333 speeds anyways. Run back through the old articles and you'll see that ddr400 slightly decreases performance versus ddr333 when the cpu is running at 166 or 133MHz clock.

that is what the m/b should do, it will set the memory accordingly unless you go in and change it, atleast that is what is has done on the 50+ m/bs i have messed around with.