Memoery speed with Athlon 64 X2 3800

[SteveB]

After the first upgrade (full system build) in 5 years I have found my
knowledge of PCs to be sadly lacking !!!

I have 2 gigs of DDR2 PC5300 (667MHz) on an AUS AM2 mboard with an
Athlon 64 X2 3800+

SiSoft Sandra reports the memory running at 333Mhz.

Is this likely to be right and a) could I check in the BIOS or b) set
it to run faster ?

Many thanks


Steve

 

[Wes Newell]

After the first upgrade (full system build) in 5 years I have found my
knowledge of PCs to be sadly lacking !!!

I have 2 gigs of DDR2 PC5300 (667MHz) on an AUS AM2 mboard with an
Athlon 64 X2 3800+

SiSoft Sandra reports the memory running at 333Mhz.

Is this likely to be right and a) could I check in the BIOS or b) set
it to run faster ?

No, it not right. If it's running at default (BySPD) it's running at a
clockspeed of 166MHz. And just like bogus FSB speeds used today that
667MHz for the ram is bogus. it does have a bandwidth of 5300 though.

Assuming you're familiar with older PC133 type ram that actually runs at
133MHz and I bit per clock, PC2100 ddr runs 2 bits per clock, and ddr2
PC4200 runs 4 bits per clock cycle. Yours, running at a clockspeed of
166Mhz gives you the 5300 bandwidth. All the newer high MHz numbers you'll
see used everywhere now is just marketing crap. Or as they put it,
"effective MHZ". But it's only effective compared to older 1bit per clock
ram, meaning the old sdram would have to be running at that speed to pass
the same data.