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whats the best ram ?

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  • whats the best ram ?

    I bought an Asusp4s533 motherboard and an Intel pentium 4 - 2.4b northwood chip with 533fsb.
    I asked the shopkeeper to give me the best ram he had for this setup and he sold me 512mb of pc2700 ddr333 ram.
    I have seen people in the forums talking about different speeds of ram etc etc, But what I want to know "is this good ram" is it good speed ram" and what exactly does "pc2700" and "ddr333" mean ???
    Also, on a benchmark test, what and where would I look for results to check that this ram is running at full speed like the shop promised, I.E- what scores in what areas would I look for ??? thankyou to anyone who has the patience to help !!!
    :cheers:

  • #2
    A lot of questions, but we'll see if we can answer them for you...

    - Just because this shop sold you "PC2700" memory doesn't mean that you got Tier 1 modules. The manufacturer has a lot to do with what is good. Crucial, Micron, Mushkin, Corsair... these have all proven themselves to be very reliable sellers of quality memory.

    - PC2700 means the overall theoretical transfer rates of the memory in question. It goes hand in hand with the "DDR" rating speed, but relates to a different aspect of the memory. PC2700 states that the memory module has a theoretical maximum bandwidth of 2.7GB/sec of data bandwidth.

    - DDR333 again is similar to the PC2700 rating but states that the memory is designed to run on a DDR based system with an internal bus speed of 333MHz. This equates to a FSB setting of 166MHz so will work fine in your system. Your P4 motherboard runs at a native 133MHz FSB setting and then quadruples this data rate internally on the motherboard itself.

    - A decent benchmarking utility is SiSoft Sandra, and the best part is that it is a free download. You can pick it up at it's homepage here. If you compare the results of the memory tests with friends who have slower systems, you'll see the performance advantage that you have. There are also some default comparison results listed within the program itself that give baseline average scores depending on the system you have. This can be used as a guide to help determine if you need to tweak some areas of your system.

    Good luck and enjoy the new toy. :)
    Old age and treachery will overcome youth and skill
    My Toys

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    • #3
      Ya PC2100 is really just the standard that it has to meet to be at that speed. Crucial and Micron are the same thing and I usually buy from them due to there free shipping.

      I have a friend that has Kingston PC2100 and I am beating his ram by a good 6-700 points in PCmark2002. Just becuase of the quality of ram. Itself.

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      • #4
        thanks darthtanion, can I quizz you or anyone else who may be able to offer some assistance some more ?
        I have been looking a little into overclocking my system and I see that in the user manual it says to overclock i should set the jumpers to jumperfree mode, jumperfree mode is the default mode as far as I'am aware anyway.
        SO,,,,,,,,
        I've adjusted the bios cpu/pci freq to the max that the system is stable with, the original default setting was 133/33x18=2.4ghz and now its at 142/36 x the cpu multiple freq (18)= 2.56ghz,right ???,I have run benchmark tests and it appears that the machine is running at this new speed, any higher and it was just crashing out, so far so good.
        Anyway,,,,,
        Now the ram is the thing in question, I have noticed people in the forums talking of overclocking the ram etc and I noticed that you replied to my post and mentioned something about 133 and 166 fsb when you were talking about the ram. Does this mean that I can change (with cooling etc) the 142 setting that I have just now up to 166x18=2988 ghz ? thats a massive jump !!!!
        I think thats what you mean, isnt it ????
        Ok next thing,,,,
        According to my asus manual I can change jumper settings to suit my setup, it lists different permatations, heres some examples, cpu 100mhz-dram100mhz....cpu133mhz-rdram166mhz....cpu100mhz-rdram200mhz... and so on... those are just random examples.
        What I'am trying to figure out now is,,, do I need to adjust these jumpers at all or will my ram be running at full speed or am I barking up the wrong tree altogether, I could move a switch to cpu133-dram166 for example but am I actually going to do anything anygood ????
        I appreciate your time if you can help.
        :cheers:

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        • #5
          As long as the jumper-free mode is set, then you can start tweaking. When it comes to tweaking the memory, experimentation and patience are in order... and probably a lot of both for the best results.

          Before you decide to crank up the memory and FSB speeds, you'll want to firstly make sure to know how to reset the motherboard to default CMOS values. It is highly probable that you'll experience that black screen on a regular basis when you begin playing. Next, you need to understand a little about FSB/AGP/PCI ratios. Some motherboards support outrageous FSB speeds and others do not. You'll have to check out the specifics of your board to see where it fits in, but it all amounts to the fact that the AGP port runs at a native speed of 66.6MHz. The port gets this speed by applying a ratio to the FSB to come up with a 66.6MHz speed. In the case of a board running at 133MHz FSB (like yours does), it applies a modifier of 1/2 to the FSB to derive the 66.6MHz AGP speed. Simple math tells us that if you immediately crank your FSB to 166MHz without a supporting AGP modifier, you'd be running your video card at 83.3MHz! Needless to say most video boards will immediately cough up a hairball when put to this extreme, so reseach will be needed to see what your board will support.

          Otherwise, you'll just need to play a bit to see how far you can go. You have managed to get to 142MHz FSB speeds so your video board will be running at 71MHz from its original 66.6MHz... not too bad so far. It may very well handle faster speeds still. If you have hit a limiting point, then try boosting the memory voltage up a little bit. As a general rule of thumb, you'll be fine with voltage settings of 2.7v without any added cooling in place. Any voltages higher should be done with some sort of active cooling in place.

          As to the concept of running the memory at a faster speed than the FSB, that can be good if you have hit the outright ceiling of your processor, but try to get the entire system running faster first instead of just one component. The system performance will benefit more in this way and the added workload will be spread out to more than just a single component.

          Also, you might want to take a look at my recent AMD OC Guide. Even though it was written for the Athlon processors, the information throughout most of the guide will be generic enough to apply to you as well. Just ignore the portions where it talks about unlocking the processor multiplier (impossible on an Intel) or anything that is AMD specific. It will hopefully give you some insight into what makes your machine tick and how to get more performance out of it.

          Good luck! :)
          Old age and treachery will overcome youth and skill
          My Toys

          Comment


          • #6
            when you say "turn up the memory voltage", do you mean the voltage on the video card memory or the voltage on the MB ram, or even the voltage on the cpu, this MB lets me do anything really.
            I must admit though,
            I just done running sys-sandra benchmark tests,,, I ran the tests with my bios settings tweaked up to 142/36 from default 133/33, the results are as follows >>>
            memory bandwidth test > int-2062mb/s & float-2070mb/s

            cpu benchmark test > mips 4802
            flops 1336/3112

            And then I tried the tests again with the bios set back to default 133/33 and guess what, the cpu results were slightly slower but the memory test shot up by about 400mb/s on both counts,,,,,
            SO, how do I get both results too go up and not just the cpu result, something is bringing the results of the ram down ???
            Please advise ????
            cheers,


            :cheers: :cheers:

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