200 FSB and PC2100 RAM...help!

[Guest]

Hello.
I just bought a DDR athlon with a 200 FSB, 1.2 ghz to be exact. Now I am wondering, will i benefit from PC2100 ram?
cause that is 266 mhz and if the bus is only 200, i am thinking that what will happen is that 66 mhz of the memory will not be used. I know they will WORK together, but I want to know if i will BENEFIT from this.
Thank you.

-Jason Falk

 

[Grizely1]

Yikes, you should have bought a 1.2GHz with a 266MHz FSB! Then you would get full beneficial use of the PC2100 memory.

 

[girish]

what motherboard do you have? the PC2100 memory you are talking about is DDR-SDRAM, which is not available in mainstream yet while not too many boards suport it.
it must be a standard PC100 or PC133 SDRAM you are using.

now the 200 or 266 MHz is the DDR speed, where actual (physical) frequency on the board is the same 100 or 133 MHz, but the data is read in or written out in both the edges of the clock. normal SDRAM (such as PC100 or PC133), for that matter any RAM reads it only on one of the edges of the square wave clock cycle, (I tried to put a picture, but this one does'nt take multiple spaces) :-( . still, hope you get the idea....

.rising edge
.| falling edge
.v v
. _ _ _
_| |_| |_| |_
. ' ' ' ' '
.| | | | | |
.V | V | V | -> SDRAM
.| | | | | |
.V V V V V V -> DDR-SDRAM

the result? using the same physical frequency, memory throughput is literally doubled!!!

if you have 266 MHz SDRAM, you will simply run at 200 MHz. if you can lift 15 kilograms, you can surely lift 5 kilos!!!
you are actually running your equipment at slower speed than it is really capable of! it is okay to do so, but running beyond its capacity (like, overclocknig ) is dangerous and should not be done without proper knowlege of it.
what you are talking about is the memory speed, which is not wasted, but underutilised. your RAM will be used as much it is. capacity (in Megabytes) and sped (in Megahertz) are two different things that describe different attributes of a given memory module.

hope it satisfies you!

girish

 

[mpjesse]

Your processors will benefit from that- don't worry. Memory is ALWAYS a bottleneck and will probably never be faster than the CPU (unless your putting a really old CPU on a board with RDRAM or DDR RAM). 1.2Ghz is pretty fast. I've got an Athlon 800 o/c'd to 950 with DDR, runs great.

-MP Jesse