What is BUS speed?

[Rory7]

What is Bus speed? also what is the function of the two sis chips on the mob (468 & 963?)

 

[PreservedSwine]

It's a frequency, really it denotes size, not speed..although larger will mean faster......think of it as how wide a river is, not how fast the water is moving......

A really wide, slow moving river will move more water that a thin, fast moving one.....So basically it is the width of the information pipeline...the wider, the more info may be moved between your cpu and your mobo in a given cpu clock cycle...the wider the bus, the better.....

 

[Rory7]

thanks, really cleared that up for me, aslso what is the sis 468 and 963?

 

[Nodsu]

The Sis 648 maybe? Is the so-called North bridge chip that contains the high end cirquitry (memory controller, AGP bridge, CPU interface). 963 is the South bridge chip that contains the slower stuff like IO, network, PCI, IDE controllers.

 

[Justin]

Originally posted by PreservedSwine
It's a frequency, really it denotes size, not speed..although larger will mean faster......think of it as how wide a river is, not how fast the water is moving......

A really wide, slow moving river will move more water that a thin, fast moving one.....So basically it is the width of the information pipeline...the wider, the more info may be moved between your cpu and your mobo in a given cpu clock cycle...the wider the bus, the better.....

Wrong.


FSB Clock Speed is not a measure of bandwidth, it is the actual clock speed, i.e. how fast the controller is cycling, measured in cycles per second. Frequency is not "size", it is exactly as it is called: frequency.

Bus WIDTH is something entirely different. Bit-width and clock speed TOGETHER give you throughput.

 

[Justin]

Originally posted by Nodsu
The Sis 648 maybe? Is the so-called North bridge chip that contains the high end cirquitry (memory controller, AGP bridge, CPU interface). 963 is the South bridge chip that contains the slower stuff like IO, network, PCI, IDE controllers.

At a more detailed level, your Northbridge is the hub of the motherboard. It connects the processor and memory, and memory/processor with the I/O Bus, which is controlled by the Southbridge. This includes the AGP bus, to a degree. The northbridge also handles IRQ passing and I/O Address transactions between PCI devices and the CPU. The CPU never makes direct communication with any other device in your computer.

The Southbridge links ALL other devices on your computer - USB devices, IDE devices such as hard drives and DVD drives, floppy disks and PCI cards, to the northbridge and thus the CPU. The exclusions are system memory and the AGP bus. All other devices communicate through the south bridge.

 

[PreservedSwine]

Originally posted by Soul Harvester
Wrong.


FSB Clock Speed is not a measure of bandwidth, it is the actual clock speed, i.e. how fast the controller is cycling, measured in cycles per second. Frequency is not "size", it is exactly as it is called: frequency.

Bus WIDTH is something entirely different. Bit-width and clock speed TOGETHER give you throughput.

Thanks for correcting me:grinthumb

 

[Rory7]

so 500hurtz means the info passes between ur mobo and cpu 500 times a second? and increasing this is like overclocking?

 

[Justin]

Originally posted by Rory7
so 500hurtz means the info passes between ur mobo and cpu 500 times a second? and increasing this is like overclocking?

thanks for not getting uppity Preserved Swine


Rory7: In short, yes.

500hz would be 500 times per second.

500mhz would be 500 million times per second

2.6ghz would be 2.6 billion times per second

Note, this only refers to how fast said device is operating... it is not really an indication of how much work it is doing.

A processor or other such device is sold to operate at speed X. If you raise that speed, you are, in all forms of the word "overclocking" that particular component. Whether by 10mhz or 1000mhz, it is overclocking.

 

[Rory7]

thanks for the info