Is my Memory running slow?

Soled

Distinguished
Sep 20, 2008
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18,510
First of all this is my first time in a forum, well no i go in them all the time but my first time speaking in one, i have this problem and ive tried loads and loads of forums and its confusing me, so i thought it if it was specific to me it would help alot.

I have just built my first gaming machine and i noticed something when i ran CPU-Z and everything was correct apart from two things, on the memory tab it says "DRAM Frequency" 533Mhz now i bought DDR2 Memory which runs at 1066Mhz so i was wondering is the DRAM the same as your actual DDR2 speed or is it half because DDR2 can load and send data at the same time right? so if it loads it at 533Mhz and sends it out at 533Mhz that should make the total speed 1066Mhz...? correct me if im wrong.

Just incase this helps you incase its a FSB:DRAM ratio or something beyond my wisdom i have included this information, my Bus speed is 266Mhz and my rated FSB is 1066Mhz and My FSB:DRAM ratio is 1:2, now i read somewhere that making your ratio 1:1 is the best... but my pc wouldnt boot when i did.

Now the second thing i noticed was on the SPD tab it says Max Bandwidth PC2-5300 (333Mhz) whats that about is my ram slot running slow or something? or is it a result of this other problem... if it is a problem that is.


Thanks in advance

Soled
 

Battenburg

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Nov 15, 2008
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18,510
Sounds fine to me. DDR2 is double data rate so you're right in understanding that the memory frequency is half what the rating is.

In your case your FSB speed is 266Mhz, meaning you would only need DDR2-533 to run this at a 1:1 ratio. But since your installed memory is rated up to 1066Mhz it is able to run at 1:2.

The only thing that seems a bit off to me is that CPU-Z is reporting the max bandwidth as PC2-5300 (333Mhz) which doesn't match up to what you say you have in the system.

You also mention that you can't run at 1:1. Does your motherboard officially support 1066 memory? How much memory do you have installed and in what configuration? Are they all the same brand/capacity?