In article <(E-Mail Removed)>,
"hardsteppa" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
> I 've just been bought an asus pundit-r barebones pc case and am
> purchasing various components for it now. As this is my first foray in
> pc-building i'm keeping it simple and cheap so i'm buying a celeron 2.4
> ghz processor, a maxtor diamondmax plus 9 120 gb drive and an asus or
> aopen cd drive. The problem i'm having is working out which RAM to
> buy. Now i know that the motherboard supports up to ddr3200 and this
> is what i was originally looking at, 512 mb or crucial ddr3200 RAM but
> having recently read that optimum RAM performance is achieved where the
> ddr number is 16 times the external bus speed of the processor. For
> the celeron the external bus speed is 133mhz. This number multiplied
> by 16 = 2128. Does this mean then that the ddr2100 RAM would be better
> matched to this system?
>
> cheers for any help
According to the manual I downloaded for this product some time
ago, the BIOS doesn't have any adjustments for either FSB or
memory clock. You can use CPUZ (
http://www.cpuid.com/cpuz.php)
or a similar utility, to see how the BIOS has set up your
processor and memory.
When I look at page 58 of the downloadable manual, it says the
P4R8L motherboard has DIMM slots labelled A1 and B1. That
labelling tells me the motherboard runs in dual channel mode.
(If I saw A1 and A2, that labelling implies single channel mode.)
This article mentions that RS300 supports dual channel.
http://www.tweaktown.com/document.ph...review&dId=584
In terms of bandwidth balance, if the processor clock is 133MHz,
then this is quad pumped to 533Megatransfers per second. The
P4 bus is 64 bits wide or 8 bytes. That means the max
transfer rate is 533*8 = 4264MB/sec.
A DDR DIMM at 133MHz would equal 133*2*(8 bytes wide) = 2128MB/sec.
If you use two matched DDR DIMMs, and the BIOS is smart enough
to select "dual channel" mode, the max bandwidth is 4256MB/sec.
There is no point these days, to buying PC2100 memory. DDR is at
the end of its life, and if you buy some, is should be some
PC3200 which you can resell. Something PC3200 or faster will
keep its resale value, while PC2100 will be harder to get rid
of.
The DDR rate of the memory is backward compatible. That means
some PC3200 can be run at DDR400, DDR333, DDR266, or DDR200.
In this case, if you bought some CAS3 PC3200, it would become
CAS2 PC2100 memory, and CAS2 is as fast as you can go.
If you look here, you can see that 512MB CAS3 PC3200 is the
most popular memory for this system. Two sticks at $86 a
piece would cost you $172.
http://www.crucial.com/store/listpar...it-R&submit=Go
If you only put one stick of RAM in the system, then
the bandwidth balance won't be quite as good. But the
computer will still run. It just won't be as peppy while
doing Photoshop (a memory intensive application).
HTH,
Paul
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