Hello members, I have on my hands a system that won't boot since I failed to drill all the way in on the Intel compatibility worksheet, which shows that the limit for the Intel DG965WH m/b is a 2.66Ghz Core2 duo, not the Core2 duo 3.0Ghz/1333bus/6Mb cache processor that I bought. Not wanting to pull back on speed by getting a slower cpu to fit the board and get it to work, it's time to get another m/b. I see that some m/b's are set up at DDR2-800MHz and FSB1333MHz. A simplistic guideline for starters, I understand, is to match the board's fsb with the memory clock speed so that, among other things, one doesn't put a cap on the other. This seems not so for boards such as, for example one I could easily buy, the Gigabyte GA-EG41MF-S2H with those 800/1333 specs. My guess as to why this setup isn't a performance drag is that (what I've read is) 90% of the requests to memory are answered within the chip's L2 cache, so the cpu usually doesn't need to send a request out to RAM, with the ideal being to keep as much computation within the cache as possible. It seems, then, that memory speed can be moving at moderate rates such as 800 since the FSB, while able to move data faster, isn't exchanging data with memory so frequently. Does that DDR2 rate of 800, as opposed to something faster, look to be no special hindrance on performance?
you match memory speed to the motherboard, not the processor with an LGA775 setup. the motherboard is the thing that houses the memory controller, after all. you can run your processor on the majority of motherboards with an FSB that is pretty much independant from the RAM speed using the NB straps.
When you say 'can run your processor' are you referring to boosting fsb speed? Actually I don't have a need or interest in adjusting frequencies or straps, so with everything at stock speed the FSB speed would be the one out of the box. Rather, I was interested in confirming that this 800-1333 discrepancy in the two speeds isn't hampering performance, since a guideline, at least from some years back, was to match memory speed and fsb speed. Do I gather from what you've said that in the case of the 775, the fsb and the memory are running independently enough that the slower 800 rate in the memory isn't hindering the 1333 fsb, and so the (old) notion of 'match memory speed to the fsb' doesn't apply? It seems everyone here is an OC'er, but my uses are photoshop, max 3ds, playing dvd's, and in the future some video editing, so pushing hardware performance to the sky isn't of any special use here, at least as far as I know that's worth the time to get involved in it.
up until about a year ago, maybe less, DDR2-800 was the official maximum speed for DDR2 available according to JDEC. the difference in speed between a DDR2-800 kit and a DDR2-1066 kit is negligable unless you want to overclock, and most motherboards only support speeds above DDR2-800 through overclocking.
