Vanilla P5B - Memory "Dividers"

[RyanJBlack]

I'm an experienced Athlon overclocker who just jumped to the Conroe bandwagon. i have a P5B Vanilla, E6400, and i ordered DDR2-800 ram which, unfortuantely, was mis-shipped and I received DDR2-667 RAM (Mushkin CL5).

Anyway, I just played around a bit on the weekend before returning the mis-shipped RAM, so I clocked it from 266 to 333 and set the DRAM FREQUENCY to DDR2-667. Voila, works perfectly, stock speed, stock voltages. So I'm sitting at 333x8 or 2666Mhz.

Don't get me wrong, I'm happy with that, but a lot of people talk about memory "Dividers". From what I can tell, there is no such thing as a "divider" on the P5B. Instead, they appear to be multipliers. In other words, I can't crank up my FSB more than 333 without running my DDR2-667 ram above stock (which, by the way, I can't even get to post at FSB334), because there is no "divider". Is this correct, or am I missing something?

When I get my DDR2-800RAM, I'm less concerned about this because that would take me to 400Mhz before I hit a RAM-limited wall (assuming the DDR2-800 memory couldn't run above its rated limit) which would take me into happy 3.2Ghz-land. But I just want to ask if my understanding of this is correct.

Thanks so much to anyone who can help---I've been a lurker here for quite some time, so I know the drill---yes, I know that some people prefer Gigabyte, and yes, I know that the P5B Vanilla isn't the overclocker's dream, but it fit my budget nicely and, quite frankly, even just 2.66Ghz is much faster than my Athlon2500+ (non-64).

 

[n7]

You using a divider right now.

The 1:1 divider.

There are no lower than 1:1 dividers though, only higher.

You have 533, 667, 800, & perhaps more, depending on mobo.

That's FSB:RAM
1:1 = 533
4:5 = 667
2:3 = 800

 

[RyanJBlack]

Semantics, but yes, that confirms what I thought. There is nothing lower than a 1x multiplier, which means that to ensure overclockability, you want to get the highest-rated memory possible.

Thanks very much. Incidentally, is it typical for DDR2 memory to fail at 1Mhz above its rated speed, even with looser memory settings or higher voltage? I'm thinking it's pretty weird that I can run at tight timings and stock voltage at DDR666 but even with the loosest possible settings and highest memory voltage, I can't go a single Mhz over that...

 

[n7]

Originally posted by: RyanJBlack
Semantics, but yes, that confirms what I thought. There is nothing lower than a 1x multiplier, which means that to ensure overclockability, you want to get the highest-rated memory possible.

Thanks very much. Incidentally, is it typical for DDR2 memory to fail at 1Mhz above its rated speed, even with looser memory settings or higher voltage? I'm thinking it's pretty weird that I can run at tight timings and stock voltage at DDR666 but even with the loosest possible settings and highest memory voltage, I can't go a single Mhz over that...

Something's wack there.

That's not very normal.

Try bumping up vFSB, vSB, vNB, etc.

I think you have those same settings on the vanilla P5B

 

[RyanJBlack]

Something's wack there.

Yeah, that's more or less what I thought. I'll see if the same thing happens when I put in the DDR2-800 Ram.. if so, I'm thinking I've got some weird setting on my motherboard that is preventing RAM overclocks.