Ram and sytem bus - someone please explain!!

[4fingerwu1]

I have an xp 1600 and wondering if it is advantageous for me to buy pc2700 ram as opposed to the pc2100 I own now -
I will not be overclocking -
Also is the sytem bus of the athlon xp 266mhz?
What is the relation between system bus speed and utilization of the RAM?
I am under the impression that Athlons have a limited system bus compared to intel p4's and therefore they cannot make use of faster ram-
someone please enlighten me
4FInger

 

[Pink0]

to your first question: no
to the rest: read the FAQs

 

[EKAtBzboyz]

Originally posted by: 4fingerwu1
I have an xp 1600 and wondering if it is advantageous for me to buy pc2700 ram as opposed to the pc2100 I own now -
I will not be overclocking -
Also is the sytem bus of the athlon xp 266mhz?
What is the relation between system bus speed and utilization of the RAM?
I am under the impression that Athlons have a limited system bus compared to intel p4's and therefore they cannot make use of faster ram-
someone please enlighten me
4FInger

only reasons to buy pc2700 ram or even pc3200 ram is 1) you are overclocking or 2) your board has kt333 chipset or kt400 chipset and supports running the memory asynchronously from the cpu fsb

system bus of athlon xp is 133*2=266 (multiplied by 2 because its ddr chip)
system bus of pentium 4 is 100*4=400 and 133*4=533 (depending on cpu) and it is multiplied by 4 because its is quadpumped

if it is a 1:1 ratio between the ram and cpu then cpu fsb=133 and ram fsb=133 (266 after the whole ddr shibang)

athlons can and do make use of the faster ram, provided your motherboard allows it to do so (with either a kt333 chipset which supports pc2700 or kt400 chipset which supports pc3200)