Optimal RAM Speeds

[ggupta]

I have read about a porformance gain of 5 to 10 percent in systems where the ram and the fsb are on the same bus at the same speed. I have pc3200 ram and a MSI k7n2 nForce2 motherboard that supports DDR400, but is it better to drop the speed of the ram to a 333 bus so that it can be balance with my Athlon XP 2500 Barton? Simply, is it worth it to slow down the ram to capture the performace gain from a balanced system?

 

[Jeff7181]

Wanna trade me your PC3200 for my PC2700? =) I'm running my XP2500 happily with a 200 Mhz FSB... I bet it would like it if I could run the RAM in sync with the FSB.

By the way, to answer your question, yes, it's better to run them in sync in your case... the Athlon XP's don't benefit from that much extra memory bandwidth, but reduding the latency between the CPU and RAM by running them in sync will provide better performance.