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Today's RAM latency thought for the day

loafbred

loafbred

Senior member
I've been using 1G of Mushkin PC3500 Level 2 in my Asus K8V SE Deluxe since I bought the board. It required 2.7v to run 2-3-2 at 200 to 210 bus, and was still a little unstable with 2-2-2, even using 2.8v. From what I read around the net, this was typical with Athlon 64's, so I just attributed it to the on-die memory controller. It was useless to try to run the motherboard at a higher bus speed because I got video artifacts (no AGP lock).

I've been really happy with this board and plan to keep it a while more, so I decided to get some of the new, cheaper TCCD memory and sell my BH-5 (people are paying $425 for it). I chose Patriot XBL because it is supposed to work at any CAS setting, and have good quality construction. After using it for a day, I won't hesitate to say it's very good. What was really surprising is that my machine is stable at 2-2-2-10, using only 2.6v at 210 bus with "system performance" setting in BIOS at "turbo". I've run the heck out of it yesterday and today without a single twitch. Now I'm thinking that something with A64's has been causing certain RAM to become unstable with TRCD at 2, rather than that TRCD setting causing the cpu's memory controller to fail.

Anybody else have RAM that runs 2-2-2 on this board? My cpu is an early 3200+ Clawhammer. Since there's been a lot of debate about the value of low latencies, I ran 3Dmark2001 at 2-2-2-10 "turbo", 2-3-2-10 "turbo", and 2.5-3-3-10 "auto". I rebooted (to change RAM timings) for each test, and waited a couple of minutes for the networking stuff to settle. The link below has the results:

3DMark2001 latency test
 
*Bump* Still no problems at 2-2-2. Anybody else running at 2-2-2 with any A64's? What chipset? I'm really curious about the reason the BH-5 wouldn't do it with mine, even at 333 bus. It ran that fine with my Abit NF7 and Barton cpu.
 
I could run mine to 215 2-2-2 after which it got sloppy.. It also ran 300 Mhz in DC

Ballistix is better though which is I sold it to tstep
 
Different memory OCs farther based on different boards and chipsets. BH-5 has really reached the end of its life as it only OCed nicely with P4's and AXP. The A64s now prefer the TCCD. THere is no real "reason" that i know of.

As for your other question of course people can run 2-2-2 in an A64 board. People do it all the time.

-Kevin
 
Originally posted by: Gamingphreek

As for your other question of course people can run 2-2-2 in an A64 board. People do it all the time.

-Kevin
Click to expand...

I guess I just haven't noticed a lot of discussion about it lately, but there was a lot of talk about the A64's memory controller not being fully stable at TRCD 3, when A64's first came out. Mushkin claimed that TRCD had to be run at 3. I have read motherboard reviews in which A64's were "tested" at 2-2-2, but I just never heard any mention of the previously claimed limit of 2-3-2 really going away. Mine would run for maybe an hour at 2-2-2 with the BH-5.

 
All you showed is 3dmark01 likes low latency. It also likes fast cpus although it somehow is supposed to be a videocard benchmarking program.
 
I'm glad to hear the your Patriot is working good. My friend was thinking of purchasing some for his a64 system.
 
Originally posted by: Viper96720
All you showed is 3dmark01 likes low latency. It also likes fast cpus although it somehow is supposed to be a videocard benchmarking program.
Click to expand...

That's why I chose it over 3DMark '03 or '05. Even in '01, it wasn't a big difference from 2.5-3-3-10 to 2-2-2-10. I can see a difference in Windows XP and a couple of games. Half Life 2 doesn't seem to change. Quake 3 feels noticeably smoother (yes, I still play it online a good bit). 🙂

 
So you got an increase of about 600 points? Isn't that kind of negligible?

You should really be running memory bandwidth tests, it would make a lot more sense.
 
It gets better still. With the BH-5, I couldn't run 1:1 above 210 due to video artifacts. With this memory, I get no artifacts at 220 bus and 1:1, still at 2-2-2-10. I increased dimm voltage to 2.7v to be safe. It passed a cycle of Memtest 86 and has been running games for two hours without a problem.
 
I have no problems running ballistix at 2-2-2 1T @ 208. Above that I have to go to 2.5-2-2 1T or it's not 100% stable.
 
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