RAM NEWB needs some help!

matermoh

Member
Feb 25, 2005
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I have an Intel 3.4 Northwood CPU @ 3.67 Ghz right now. My RAM is 1 512MB PC3200 Kington and 1 512MB PC3200 Geil. The Kingston is value ram and I'm not sure how good the Geil is. I'm told my overclocking potential is limited due to the quality of my RAM. Could someone explain how CPU overclocking and RAM are related? Also, could someone give me some suggestions on what to upgrade to? THanks a bunch!!
 

Cares

Senior member
Mar 8, 2005
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First of all, IIRC, using mixed RAM already limits your overclocking potential.
 

mwmorph

Diamond Member
Dec 27, 2004
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cpu overclocking riases FSB speed to raise Cpu speed. Ram also runs on the fsb bus, so if you have a 3ghz cpu, and yor fsb speed stock si 200mhz, it would be like this
Cpu is 200mhz X 15(multiplier)
Ram is 200mhz X 2 (DDR means double data rate)[this is 400mhz otherwise known as pc3200)

now say you oc to 3.750ghz
Cpu is 300mhz X 15
Ram is 300mhz X 2 or a hell of a lot higher than 400mhz stock speed.
at tihs point your cpu may be able to get htat high in speed, but yuor ram wont and thus, your ram will limit your oc.

yuo have 2 choices, use a divider, or buy ocing ram.

using adivider looks like this
cpu=300 X 15=3750mhz
ram = 300 X 2/3 X15=400mhz

what a divider does is that it limits how fast a system can access the ram so it runs async from the cpu. in this case, for every 3 million hertz the processor works, the rma works for only 2 million hertz thus effectively slowinng down the speed.

the problem is that it decreases performance. i dont know exactly how much it affects an Pentium 4 but i know it has a huge performance penalty for an Amd Athalon XP and almost no penalty for an AMD Athalon64.
 

angstsoldat

Senior member
Jun 30, 2005
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since no one likes reposters im officially hijacking this thread, thanks. :p

no but really.. I got a question.. What would be better performance-wise? 4 sticks of 512 to = 2 GB.. or 2 sticks of 1GB to = 2 GB .. like would 4 sticks of 512 make it go faster and even cheaper than the 2x1 GB? or would it all just depend what memory it was .. my favorite I think so far is OCZ .. I would'nt overclock it much if at all.