What is the difference between a FSB of 200 and a Multiplier of 10 (2000GHZ) and a FSB of 133 and a Multiplier of 15 (1995GHZ)? I know 5GHZ , but my question is do I want a higer or lower FSB or Multiplier when I overclock? Does it matter?
curme, I'm pretty sure you meant to use MHz instead of GHz. Sure, people have gotten some pretty good overclocks out of P4s, but I haven't seen one hit 2 terahertz yet. What blasster said is true, but ONLY if you have your memory running at the same speed. Besides increasing bandwidth between CPU and memory, where a lot of traffic occurs, running them asynchronously creates a performance hit in having to coordinate the two clocks.
Yes, MHZ. It's been a long day! I keep reading about making sure that memory is running the same speed. But on my ASUS A7V8X, in my bios (I have the latest version) it only gives me an option to mess with the RAM's (CORSAIR PC2700, two sticks of 512) timing, and then only to bump it up one notch (and from what I've read, you want it as low as possible). Does that sound right? Is my bios not letting me mess with my RAM's FSB speed, or am I just missing it? I'm I missing an important overclocking concept? And if I can't mess with the speed, how can I check to see if it is running at the same speed as my CPU?
In your bios there should be a setting that changes the speed of the ram. It should give you the option to run it at a percentage of the FSB or something similar. You would want it at 100% so that they are the same, especially for an AMD setup.
High fsb - low multi is generally better, but in Asus A7V8X you want to keep the ram at the same speed as the cpu anyway - big performance hit if you don't. Having ram fsb different to cpu is mainly intel chips - as the performance hit isn't as bad as AMD - my p4 2.4c is @ 275mhz - difficult/expensive to find ram that can do that hence running it at ratio 5:4 (cpu - 275mhz, ram - 220mhz)
I don't have an ASUS board but I've looked in quite a few BIOS's. If you don't see a setting for changing the ram divider or something or even the ram speed, it may be because you have it set to Automatic or SPD (serial presence detect). On my MSI board if I keep my ram set to automatic is will stay in sync with the CPU front side bus. But it still gives me the option to change my timings. If you have CPU-Z installed, you can look on the memory tab and it will tell you what speed your ram is running at and what the divider ratio is in respect to your cpu, i.e. 1:1 or 5:4 etc.