Pc100 memory at CL2, what does that mean?

[erikiksaz]

i just used sandra, and it told me that my pc100 memory is at CL2 at 100mhz. and at CL3 at 125mhz. what does this mean?

and darnit, sandra just revealed that i don't have fast writes or agp sidebanding enabled. i have no clue where those options are, i didnt see them in the bios.

 

[Ulysses]

1. That means, if SiSoft Sandra is correct, that if you run your RAM at up to 124 MHz it can be stable at CAS latency 2-2-2, but if you exceed that it will be unstable unless you set the CAS/RAS BIOS settings to 3-3-3. The difference in performance is on the order of around 5% better with CL = 2, depending. In short, that's pretty good PC100 RAM.

2. Oh, sidebanding, schmidebanding - I'm a BX guy. 🙂 - somebody else fill in the blanks here.

 

[AndyHui]

Sidebanding applies to all AGP cards that support it. Not all do, and I recommend switching it off. Although it is supposed to allow the transfer of more data over the AGP bus, in practice, there is no performance gain.

Enabling sidebanding usually reduces the overclocked speeds that AGP cards can run at.

Fastwrites are a feature of AGP4x capable motherboards and video cards. Fastwrites bypass the system bus and write directly to the AGP bus, again supposedly speeding up transfers. In limited situations this may provide a small performance gain. In most cases, there is no material increase in performance.

 

[erikiksaz]

that's good to hear. i wonder if my stick of ram will work in tbird platforms though. i know it's not a namebrand, and i haven't been able to find the company that produced it. all i know is that the guy i bought it from said it was from japan.