Quote:
|
Originally Posted by fatty
FSB of 200? I thought it was 1000!  But it seems like the max supported is PC2-6400 like you said... so I'm still confused. Thanks for the tips on the PSU - very helpful. |
FSB on an AMD platform is not the same as an Intel platform. You may be confusing it with Hypertransport that is on the board. The 200 MHz is simply for CPU to talk to the memory - for which it has a direct link, unlike an Intel platform which still has a legacy FSB (not sure why they haven't done away with this yet because its a bottleneck).
This will help you understand the 200 MHz portion - DDR stands for double datarate. Standard memory of the past worked like everything else. A clock cycle came around, and a transaction could be done. DDR changed the rules on that in which case a transaction could be done on the 'rising' part of a clock signal, and then one more on the 'falling' part of a clock cycle. DDR2, though it has some disadvantages (latency being one of them), doubled this again, so it can do 4x transactions per single clock cycle.
So why 800 MHz for this CPU? Simple - 200 MHz works into the above scenario like this - 200 x 2 = 400 MHz for standard DDR (The low latency of standard DDR almost makes it more desirable to me as a technology, and I still use it, but thats a story for another post), and 200 x 2 x 2 = 800 MHz for DDR2. An Intel platform will use similar speeds for the same result when talking to memory.
Still confused? Maybe I shouldn't confuse the situation worse by bringing crossbar technology into it - which doubles things again by hitting each individual RAM module independantly! :p
-S