The specs on this board say that it support DDR400, but mine only
allows up to 333 in the bios. I'm running a Celeron 2.4 with the 533
FSB. Can this board run DDR400 with the 533 FSB?
There is a table in the manual that looks like this:
CPU FSB DDR DIMM Type Memory Frequency
800 MHz PC3200/PC2700*/PC2100 400/333*/266 MHz
533 MHz PC2700/PC2100 333/266 MHz <-------
400 MHz PC2100 266 MHz
So that table, at least, states the normal range of settings.
Boosting the FSB clock will raise both the CPU and memory
clocks at the same time, which is one way to harvest more
of the headroom of the memory. Test your system with
memtest86 from memtest.org and Prime95 from mersenne.org,
to make sure your new settings are stable. If you see memory
errors, sometimes a little extra Vdimm will fix it ("DDR
reference voltage"). Boosting the FSB clock means the CPU is
overclocked, while the memory can still be run within
spec, depending on the degree of overclock selected.
If the board doesn't have an AGP/PCI lock, be careful with
the overclocking. The FSB clock is divided down to make a
PCI clock, and if you don't know anything about how the
clocking circuits work on a new motherboard, the max
overclock is (37.5/33) or about 13% or so. Using a higher
value can sometimes result in hard drive corruption, and
you'll need to do a lot more research in the private forums
to find out how much more your board can tolerate. Not all
motherboards properly restrict clock speeds to safe levels.
Paul
