athlons and 4 banks of memory?

[arnold873]

i`ve recently read that if you try to use 4 banks of memory with an athlon system the mem clock speed drops?
whats with that is this a fixable issue ?

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[endyen]

It's probably a combination of the odmc, and the comparative lengths of the memory traces. Amd needs to work on the controller, mobo makers have to work on the board wiring. It's not a big deal, the drop in mem speed has little effect on performance.
It's a problem that has come up with most chipset makers, now and again.

 

[arnold873]

so going with 2gb of memory 512x4
would not hit my performance?

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[endyen]

It would kill perf, if you were only using less than 1/2 of the memory, but, if you were using 2 gigs of ram, rather than a gig of ram, and your pagefile, it would be a big boost. If your memory usage is < 1 gig, dont do it. If it's more, it's worth the timimg loss.

 

[arnold873]

Poster: endyen
Subject: Re: athlons and 4 banks of memory?

It would kill perf, if you were only using less than 1/2 of the memory, but, if you were using 2 gigs of ram, rather than a gig of ram, and your pagefile, it would be a big boost. If your memory usage is < 1 gig, dont do it. If it's more, it's worth the timimg loss.

say what???

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[ChipDeath]

Even slower RAM is massively faster than a Hard disk, so if you're using up a whole GB (depends what you're doing... most people wouldn't very often), then the system will have to page stuff to and from the disk, which will be fairly slow. In that situation it's the amount of RAM that's the performance bottleneck, not the speed of the RAM. If you were to upgrade the RAM so it no longer had to 'borrow' some hard disk space, it would run a lot faster.

If, However, you never use more than 1Gb of RAM anyway, then not only is that extra 1Gb of RAM going to sit there unused, but everything will run <i>slightly</i> slower, because the RAM will run a little slower due to the chipset limitation.

That's basically what Endyen's saying I think.

---
A64 3200+ Winchester @ 258x10=2580Mhz, ~1.52 Vcore
1Gb RAM, running at various strange speeds... :lol:
Voltmodded Sapphire 9800Pro @ 450/350 w/ modded VGA silencer 3.

 

[arnold873]

thanks chipdeath
i think i`m going with 1 gb

hear me now, believe me later, trust me in between
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i`ll be back

 

[sparky853]

I just built my new A64 3200+ system, and tried using 2GB of RAM in a 4x512MB combination, which dropped my RAM speed from DDR400 to DDR333. I benchmarked my system with both 1GB@DDR400 and 2GB@DDR333, and the DDR400 benchmarked 5-10% faster overall, and the memory benchmark even more.

So like ChipDeath says, unless you absolutly need 2GB, stick with just 1GB, or if you need 2GB, you can always go with 2x1GB chips, although this is quite a bit more expensive.

AMD 64 3200+, MSI K8T Neo2, 1GB Dual-Channel DDR400, ATI R9800PRO 128MB, TT PurePower 420W, LG DVD+-R/RW

 

[arnold873]

just built my new A64 3200+ system, and tried using 2GB of RAM in a 4x512MB combination, which dropped my RAM speed from DDR400 to DDR333. I benchmarked my system with both 1GB@DDR400 and 2GB@DDR333, and the DDR400 benchmarked 5-10% faster overall, and the memory benchmark even more.

So like ChipDeath says, unless you absolutly need 2GB, stick with just 1GB, or if you need 2GB, you can always go with 2x1GB chips, although this is quite a bit more expensive.

AMD 64 3200+, MSI K8T Neo2, 1GB Dual-Channel DDR400, ATI R9800PRO 128MB, TT PurePower 420W, LG DVD+-R/RW



does anyone know why then voodoo just built their new sli machine with 2gbs?
and i think ddr 500?
using a asus a8n sli mb


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i`ll be back<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by arnold873 on 02/24/05 02:28 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[sparky853]

Different chipsets would be my first guess .

Other than that, they may underclock their RAM and just use the numbers as a selling point??

AMD 64 3200+, MSI K8T Neo2, 1GB Dual-Channel DDR400, ATI R9800PRO 128MB, TT PurePower 420W, LG DVD+-R/RW

 

[arnold873]

same exact board and they use faster ram?
check themn out
i assume its voodoo.com


hear me now, believe me later, trust me in between
i`m a cop you idiot
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[apesoccer]

I asked a similar question in another post. The response i got was that you can force your board to run at 400 instead of 333, it was just not as stable. Alternately, you can also get 2gb from 2 sticks...

Current machines running F@H:
Athlons: [64 3500+][64 3000+][2500+][2000+][1.3x1][366]
Pentiums: [X 3.0][P4 2.4x5][P4 1.4]

It's not worth saying unless it takes a really long time to say!

 

[arnold873]

asked a similar question in another post. The response i got was that you can force your board to run at 400 instead of 333, it was just not as stable. Alternately, you can also get 2gb from 2 sticks...

thats prob why some companies use a higher ddr memory?


hear me now, believe me later, trust me in between
i`m a cop you idiot
i`ll be back

 

[apesoccer]

I couldn't say...maybe that's why...

Current machines running F@H:
Athlons: [64 3500+][64 3000+][2500+][2000+][1.3x1][366]
Pentiums: [X 3.0][P4 2.4x5][P4 1.4]

It's not worth saying unless it takes a really long time to say!