Not all FSB speed increments created equal?

[CrazySaint]

I've always been under the impression that increasing the FSB in equal increments would always yield approx. equal increases in speed. However, using the Distributed Folding client has a benchmark, I've noticed that incrementing to certain speeds provides a disproportionate increase in performance. For instance, I increased my FSB from 145MHz to 146MHz which yielded the expected negligable benefit. However, the increase to 147MHz provided an approx. 8% increase in performance from a less than 1% increase in clockspeed! Has anybody else noticed this and is there any rhyme or reason as to why this happens?

 

[THUGSROOK]

im assuming youre talking about i845 boards....?

yes this is very typical of all the boards ive owned over the last year ~ the only excuse i can think of is "lack of quality".

 

[CrazySaint]

Originally posted by: THUGSROOK
im assuming youre talking about i845 boards....?

yes this is very typical of all the boards ive owned over the last year ~ the only excuse i can think of is "lack of quality".

Yep, sorry, forgot to mention system specs:
Asus P4B533-V
P4 1.8A@2.646/DDR392
256MB PC2700C2 Corsair XMS
Seagate 'Cuda IV 80GB HDD

 

[ChampionAtTufshop]

i dont know if it has anything to do with this, but sometimes (most asus) the bios set frequency is a bit (usually less than 1mhz) lower than actual
if you look in wcpuid, you may find that at 146mhz bios, it was actually 145.5-145.9 (as this would make it round up to 146)
and at 147 it could be 147.0-147-4 (as this would make it round down)

i dont think it accounts for almost 8% increase however....