dual channel effects overclocking?

Associate
Joined
12 Feb 2004
Posts
1,805
Location
Sheffield
hiho

first off... spec:

skt A Mobile Barton 2800+
dfi lanparty ultra b nfII

originally: 512mb pc3200

believe it or not i did originally have a stable overclock of 225 x 10.5 = 2.36 GHz

which i though was pretty good for pc3200 ram (geil golden dragon)


but after a while i bought another stick, unfortunately after a good few months so it was effectively unmatched pair. when i added the new stick i could only get a stable overclock with the FSB on 200, not one mhz more.

the multiplier would go to 11.5 so still on 2.3GHz


so about a year later, with my infinate wisdom :o i decided to upgrade to 2GB ram like any gamer with some spare cash. so i slotted in 2x 1GB pc4000 sticks, knowing that my board and cpu did originally run stable @ an fsb of 225.

:mad: however i'm struggling to get above 200fsb again, even with a fairly high voltage and Cas3 ram as opposed to my cas 2 pc3200. so i have double the ram, but it's slower in effect i guess :/


so i'm thinking that dual channel might be effecting the o/c? anyone any thoughts on that. i intend to test, but it will have to be tomorrow, but any thoughts / opinions welcome.


flogging an old system is what's it's all about :D
 
It was wall known that running in dual channel lowered your max fsb on the athlon XP's while they were the in thing. One of my mobbos would hit 235fsb in single channel but only 217fsb in dual channel, no matter which slots i had the RAM in (even though there was only three, who's stupid flapping idea was that anyway?!?! only having 3 bloomin' RAM slots.
 
It was mainly going from single sided RAM (the chips on one side of the PCB only) to double sided RAM (chips on both sides of the PCB) that made the most impact on overclocks on the NF2 chipset.
 
ah i thought it was somethin like that. was oh so long ago

this bodes well for my project then :), OCing socket A to the max, think i have 2x256mb of single sided twinmoss BH-5 somewhere?? lol
 
Yeah, DC does affect the overall max FSB (but about 10-15 Mhz), but also has performance benefits.

I think its just the 1gb sticks - from what i remember NF2 mobo were picky with RAM, and very picky with 1GB sticks.

IMO, the best memory you can get for your rig would be winbond BH-5 sticks (I had my gig runnning at 250 a 2-2-2-8 for a very short time, before I went silence over performance). For uber FSB sticks you want the single sided BH-5 modules (256MB) running as a pair.

Note that winbond UTT chips dont really go too well with the NF2 chipset from what ive heard.
 
dual channel on nforce 2 is useless since the fsb does not run faster than the ram so no more bandwidth can be gained by dual channel, at the most a tiny bit of efficiency can be gained around 1-2%.

best of running single channel and clocking the ram and fsb to its max on a one to one ratio
 
Cyber-Mav said:
dual channel on nforce 2 is useless since the fsb does not run faster than the ram so no more bandwidth can be gained by dual channel, at the most a tiny bit of efficiency can be gained around 1-2%.

best of running single channel and clocking the ram and fsb to its max on a one to one ratio

I kind of 50/50 agree/disagree with you there mate.

I agree because back in the day of nf2 i was running single channel at 240-250 fsb and getting better bandwidth and benchies than MOST people on dual channel.

However, when i was doing seti my mate had the same rig as me, just in dual channel, running very similair fsb and clock speeds but he was doind a WU (work unit) 5 to 6 mins faster than me, even though i was at a slightly higher CPU speed due to my fsb being higher than his.

The gains are all a bit like swing and roundabouts on the nf2, you win some and you loose some with dual channel on them.
 
You never mentioned which timings you running the ram at, you might need to loosen then up a litte though, even 1mhtz shouldnt be a problem.

Maybe try 1 stick, then the other, worth a shot to see if it has any effect.
 
okee thanks for the info so far :)

single channel doesn't seem to be making a great deal of difference, crashes on 210MHz. i'm most dissapointed now :(

timings are: 3-4-3-8 (stock), which seems pretty loose to me, but i dont think i'll ever get the hang of mem timings properly.

my 3200 was on 2-3-3-11

oh yeah the 11 thing, aparently that was the 'thing' to do with NFII?


oh now i have a new problem, whenever i set the multiplier to 11 or higher, the mobo sees it as 6 :confused: so 200 x 11 is now = 1200MHz aparently :o lol

why do i bother
 
Back
Top Bottom