What would the performance hit be if I......

Caporegime
Joined
28 Feb 2004
Posts
74,822
Hi all, hopefully someone can shed some light on my situation and point me in the right direction.

I am, at present, running a AMD A64 3000+ @ 2565mhz overall speed.
FSB is 285 and multiplier is 9

My memory is 2x512mb Mushkin PC4200 running 1:1 with the FSB with reasonably tight timings of 2.5,2,2,7 @1T.

On Sisoft Sandra's Memory benchark I get scores of

RAM Bandwidth Int Buff'd iSSE2 : 7213 MB/s
RAM Bandwidth Float Buff'd iSSE2 : 7122 MB/s

Which seem pretty good compared to their sytems but not sure how good that is in real world terms. Certainly I am more than happy with the speed of my machine and would not ever want to do anything that would make it seem any slower.

My problem is that I want to go too 2GB of memory, now I see two ways of this :

1, Firstly I can spend a small fortune (approx £270) and buy some more PC4200 that will run at my FSB 1:1, easily without clocking much which I would prefer but the problem being I do not have £270 ish if I did I would not be asking these questions :)

2, Or secondly I can buy some cheap PC3200 or some not so cheap PC4000 and run the memory on a divider.

My questions are what would the performance hit be like running PC3200 on a divider compared to my memory at the moment?
And what would people recommend me to do really?

Just as an aside, not sure if it makes any difference to any of the above but I will be getting a X2 3800+ in the next couple of weeks or so which I know does run happily at 285+ FSB so really would like memory that can keep up.

If anyone needs any more info about my system feel free to ask.

Cheers in advance for any help you can give.
 
Sell your gig of mushkin as you wont be needing them (4 sticks in a64 boards = 2t timing = bad).

Put the money towards a 2GB set of GSkill HZ and run them on a 180 divider. You really wont see much, if any 'real world' loss of performance by running on a divider with A64 machines and the increase in MB will more than counter any loss in bandwidth.
 
Luckily there is a very little performance hit when running on a divider.

getting 1Gb sticks that can run >250Mhz with tight timings is almost impossible and will certainly cost a small fortune and IMO not worth it.

Most sticks either run at PC4000 with 3-4-3-8 timings or PC3200 with 2.5-3-2-6 timings, there are no 1Gb sticks that can run 2-2-2-5

But the slight disadvantage of slower speed and timings is much smaller than the advantage of having 2Gb

I went from 1Gb 250Mhz 2.5-2-2-8 to 2Gb 211Mhz 2.5-3-3-8 and don't really notice a difference, only in memory benchmarks which are rubbish as the results are not the same in real games and apps.
 
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