I have an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ Black Edition, stock speed 2600 MHz (200 x 13 multiplier). I also have 2GB TWIN2X2048-6400C4DHX Corsair RAM.

If I slightly overclock, I seem to be able to run at the stock CPU voltage and maintain system stability at both 14x and 14.5x multipliers (2800MHz and 2900 MHz respectively). I find, however, using CPU-Z that my RAM is running faster (800MHz) at the "slower" 14x multiplier and it runs slower (725MHz) with the 14.5 multiplier).

My question: will the system be "faster" by increasing the CPU speed 3.5% (2.8GHz to 2.9GHz) while suffering a 10%+ hit on the RAM MHz speed, or should I sacrifice the CPU multiplier bump and take advantage of the RAM running at the full DDR2 PC6400 rating?

I don't know if there is a 1:1 correlation between increasing/decreasing CPU speed and RAM speed for overall system speed calculations.

Thoughts?

Thanks,

Experiment a little... my guess would be to increase your memory speed to it's max specs and leave the CPU speed multiplier alone

Your ram speeds and cpu speeds are 'linked' so the ram will respond when you change the cpu speed. With the slight increases (in speed) you are achieving, it may be difficult to notice performance change.

Found the following research which might be of interest to others: http://overclockers.com/articles1477/

Hmmmm...

Most performance gain was the MASSIVE overclock. About 40%.