i know that a pentium 4 has a quad pumped bus speed. my ddr memory has a rating of 400mhz, but my bios only says it has 200mhz. what is up with this, why isn't this hardware just rated at 200mhz for the ram and the non quad pumped speed? p4 at 3330mhz 256mb pc3200 80gb wd hdd geforce 4 mx440 teporary Audigy 2 ZS dvd and cd burner only 15 so i am tight on cash

Well the BIOS says 200MHZ because that is the real speed of the Ram. The effective speed of the RAM is 400MHZ since DDR stands for Double Data Rate, or two instructions per clock cycle. Since Intel quad pumps their bus speeds, the 200MHZ DDR 400 runs at an effective speed of 800MHZ, or 4 instructions per clock cycle. Sempron 2400+ OCed to 2.2GHZ Abit NF7-S2 1 GB PC3200 Ram Thermaltake T2-M4 HSF rmackie@microtailors.com www.microtailors.com

fsb = front side bus (frequency your computer runs at) cpu = fsb*multiplier (multiplier is locked, and varies by cpu) ram = fsb (at 1:1 ratio...if you use a multiplier, it will be a fraction of your fsb) effective speeds: effective fsb = fsb*4 (pentiums are quad-pumped) effective ram = fsb*2 (if in dual channel mode) So, at stock speeds (fsb=200), my computer with a cpu (multiplier=15...I have a 3.0 ghz cpu): fsb = 200 cpu = 15*200 = 3000 mhz = 3.0 ghz ram = 200 mhz effective fsb = 200*4 = 800 mhz ram = 200*2 = 400 mhz (in dual channel mode) BIOS reports the true figures, not the effective speeds (which are for marketing purposes, so you can see how much faster it'd be compared to older chips). It wouldn't be right to say the fsb is actually going at 800 mhz...it just means it's doing as much work it would have been doing if it were actually at 800 mhz