I'm a bit confused about something...

[cjcross001]

i have an amd athlon 64 3400+ and it says the fsb is 1600 mhz. is the fsb truly that fast? is there any ram that can even run at that frequency? i'm confused because i've been told that my fsb/mem ratio should be 1:1 on an athlon system, but how can that be possible if the fsb is 1600 mhz and (at least i dont think i can) get any ram that runs that fast. my mother board is capable of running at 1600 fsb but whats the point? any info you could provide would be much appreciated.

 

[kimbo.ati]

LOL, i dont think that is the front side buss i have a athlon xp 2800+ and the fsb speed is only 170 .

if your system is running fine no problems then dont convern your self

 

[vnf4ultra]

The actual speed of the "fsb" is 200mhz, which is like quad pumped to 800mhz(I guess the 1600 is kinda like how ddr400 ram runs at 200mhz but because it's double data rate it is effectively 400mhz. Usually the bios has a fsb with settings like 200mhz, and a htt multi which is normally 4x for that type of system, if a person oc's they reduce the htt multi to 3x, because you don't want to oc the hypertransport bus(fsb), just the cpu speed. So ddr400(pc3200) ram at stock runs at 200mhz, just like the cpu runs at 200mhz. It's confusing, I know.

 

[kimbo.ati]

yeh that is a logical answer cheers now i know what that means to

 

[cjcross001]

makes a lot of sense. after reading some more about it i came to a similar conclusion. sometimes i wish they would just post the actual frequency on products. thanks for the help.

 

[nein]

makes a lot of sense. after reading some more about it i came to a similar conclusion. sometimes i wish they would just post the actual frequency on products. thanks for the help.

They aren't actually suppose to post the frequency, only the ignorant stupid ones do. Nobody really bothered with Buses anymore, only old hardware used them. Everybody had graduated to Scalable Link Interface... nope it isn't a Bus, it's a Scalable Link Interface.

The quad-pump explanation version is for people slow to comprehend Scalable Link Interface. Buses are classical Intel Symmetric Processing (Time-share/Time-division Processing) designs, in all pure time-based designs, the clock frequency per time period determined the bandwidth, hence the clock equated to the perfomance rating.

Scalable Link Interfaces are Distributed Processing designs, directly bandwidth-based and normally rated by a number standing for bandwidth throughput. For example - ADSL isn't rated by clock frequency, T1 isn't rated by clock frequency, T2 isn't rated by clock frequency, T3 isn't rated by clock frequency, 10/100 ethernet isn't rated by clock frequency, Fibre-channel isn't rated by clock frequency, SCSI isn't rated by clock frequency, SATA isn't rated by clock frequency, DVI isn't rated by clock frequency, etc...