Better than 1:1 timings?

[slmckenzie]

I was messing around and looking at CPU-Z, and I stumbled across something that looked strangly odd to me. Under the memory tab, it tells me that my RAM ratio, FSB😀RAM is 3:5. Now, that seems awfully strange to me, because wouldn't that be even tighter timings than a 1:1?

Mathmatically, the ratio makes sense. My FSB is running at 100MHz. My RAM I'm using, PC2700, is running at DDR333, or 166MHz. For some reason, my motherboard is automatically trying to run the ram at 3:5 ratio. However, I've NEVER heard of anything like that before. I've always heard of looser timings, of things such as 5:4, but never tighter than 1:1.

Is my computer royally strange, or is there something seriously wrong? Please help!

*edit* Forgot to include that my CPU is a P4 2.60GHz northwood. It is running at a 26x multiplier. It seems really strange. Is this a CPU caused fiasco? Motherboard? Ram? I'm so confused!

 

[endyen]

1:1 is as tight as it gets. It's called syncronous, or unity.
The numbers you are talking about are just the ratio of the fsb to the memory bus. Having the memory bus run faster than the bus that feeds it, is not usually much good.
The strange thing is that getting closer to syncronous isn't always good,but that's another story

 

[slmckenzie]

So basically I'm kind of in a bad position right now?

And if so, how would I go about fixing it? Everything's currently set to Auto right now in BIOS. (I'm running a P4S800D-X Asus Mobo)

 

[endyen]

What chip are you running?
While not running syncronous isn't good, in your case, it just may not matter. The memory bottleneck will be the fsb.

 

[slmckenzie]

I was going to type it all out, but I forgot that I had a validation link online. Here ya go:

http://valid.x86-secret.com/show_oc?id=78352

Any other questions, feel free to ask and I'll try to answer ASAP.

*edit* I forgot that link is actually of my processor OC'ed 17%. The numbers still match up the same when you compare FSB to the RAM ratio.

 

[bront]

If you're looking for OC, try droping it to 1:1 or 3:4, and then pushing the CPU. Might get you more performance if the memory is the limiting factor.

 

[apache_lives]

3:5 makes you ram run faster then the FSB which is (usually) better then slower ram ratios, 1:1 would run the ram alot slower which isnt good.

Afterall your processor has a FSB running at 100/400

 

[endyen]

You're running your pc2700 @close to pc3200 speeds. It may be the limiting factor in your OC (not that 17% is bad or anything) If you drop thr ratio to 3:4, you may be able to get a little higher.