Whats the real benefit of the KT133A?

[Crimson]

Just picked up an Abit-KT7A board to use with my Thunderbird 1100.. Before I had just a KT7 running at 110x11 (1210mhz).. So I picked up the KT7A (For no particular reason other than I always have to have the latest equipment.. heh).. ANYWAYS, I unlocked the multiplier on the Thunderbird and I am now running at 141x8.5 (1200mhz) and I notice very little difference in speed.. Quake benchmarks are almost exactly the same.. Whats the real benefit of the KT133A chipset? With the old KT7 board, I could still run my memory at 133+, just the FSB would not run at 133mhz..

The only real benefit of the 133A chipset I have seen so far, is that running at 141x8.5 seems more stable than 110x11..

 

[Deeko]

The benifit is running at the higher bus speed. It generally will give you better speeds. Also, TBirds will be coming out that only support the 133 MHz bus, so you will need it for them.

 

[Informant X]

Yea, you'll be ready for the new line of AMD's that come out. Also overclocking with the FSB as opposed to multiplyer you'll notice a bigger speed increase. Sometimes around ~10%, and in some cases even more. Also most of them have RAID onboard (If that suits your fancy). I don't get why you FPS would be the same in Q3. Maybe you don't have that good of ram or something? So that slowing it down at the high buspeeds? With the KT133 you could run your ram at 133 and the cpu at 100 true but, the bottleneck is the 100 fsb to the cpu. The cpu isn't getting enough information. So thats why when you run both at 133 it will be faster.

 

[Davegod75]

higher bus speeds which means better memory scores and a faster system

 

[MCS]

Means you can now play with FSBs from 100 to 150 or so aswell as just the multiplier

 

[fkloster]

I believe what Crimson is trying to say is that he seeing little to know "Real World" difference in upgrading to a KT133A

 

[Crimson]

Yeah the real world benefit seems pretty low to me.. I have real high quality memory, its running at 141mhz currently, CAS2.. 512 megs of Crucial (2-256meg modules).. I haven't compared the difference in memory scores in something like Sandra, that would be something I would try.. but as for real world performance, I see no difference in Quake 3 at 110mhz FSB than Quake 3 at 141mhz FSB.. Unless my video card or something else is the bottleneck, which is possible when running a CPU at 1200mhz.. I am using a Geforce 2 GTS..

 

[JJ8]

The difference is not that the RAM can be run at higher speeds, but that the memory at 133 on the 133A runs sync with the rest of the system. On the plain 133 chipset, you may set your memory to +33, to achieve 133, but most of the memory bandwidth that +33 MHz gives you is lost in the tremendously increased system latencies. The 133A removes those latencies, which is indeed why the 133A scores almost as well as, if not equal to PC2100 DDR based systems.

Jay

 

[Gouki255]

So is there a benefit setting the memory at 133 while leaving the system running at 100 on the kt133? or is the benefit really slight?

 

[JJ8]

Heh, thats a loaded question...

First off, you would have to consider the CAS setting at both speeds. Assume for argument's sake that it'll run CAS x at both 100 and 133. Yes, the benefit would range from nil to noticable. What really benefits the user though is if you have some of the tweaks in your BIOS enabled. Specifically, 4-way interleave is probably the most powerful tweak you can get for free next to overclocking your CPU. It writes the incoming stream of data to different data banks of your RAM, and in doing so it can overlap the write's and latencies of the two banks to give you a pretty good increase in bandwidth. Running at 133 MHz combined with 4-way interleave will definatley give you a noticalbe increase in performance. As always, I would suggest a program such as Sandra so you can personally see the benefit. On the other hand, if you have to drop your CAS to run at 133, its probably too close to call.

Jay