jam saying both cpu and ram must run under sync for beter performance outlander saying the faster the ram the better the perfomance will be.he also said running cpu and ram under sync is bs who is right im confussed coz im getting e6600 so if jam is right i need to get ddr2533 to run under sync if outlander is right then i need to get ddr2 800

my board supports ddr2 667 and 800 so not sure if ddr2 533 will work or not

I think that with any processor is ALWAYS better to go with the DDR2-800 beacause 533 will slow your pc down!

Amd Athlon 5200 2.6ghz;
Asus m2n-e sli;
2GB DDR800 kingston;
Asus GF8600GTS;
Seagate 7200rpm 320GB;

Just download Sisoft Sandra, go to the benchmarks and look for yourself. I need to post those benchmarks I took, but with work and college, I just havent found the time, I'll try to tonight.

The faster the RAM, the more bandwidth, the faster it will be. The loss people are talking about(being out of sync myth) comes from the fact that RAM access is slowed a bit when going to faster RAM because one has to input a slower access time for the ram (RAM access timing/settings) because the RAM can not respond fast enough at higher clock frequencies(about as non-tech as I can put it). So one trades access time (a nano second or so) for hundreds of MB's per sec. more bandwidth.

In any case, I understand where he is coming from, there are tons of websites backing the in-sync myth(pun intended), but it is a fallacy and a lot of sites will also tell one this. Confusing. But back to facts, you will score higher FPS scores in any game with a higher bandwidth RAM. Just look at GPU clock VS it's RAM speed, you'll find it is sometimes triple the GPU clock speed.

CPU's, GPU's can process in "billions" of instructions per second and some in trillions(and more). If one imagines an instruction as 8 bits([1 byte]as an example only, some instructions take hundreds of bits/bytes to complete) One can picture the bandwidth available inside a CPU. So why would one want to limit bandwidth even more in and out of ones CPU? Video cards have bandwidth in RAM speeds of almost 100gb's a sec these days, and still if one overclocks the RAM speed even more, the GPU can still take advantage of it and gain extra bandwidth and one sees an increase in FPS performance in games/video apps.

Besides all that blah which probably is hard to follow by now. The CPU is not the only thing that address RAM, the HD's, CD-ROM's, DVD-ROM's can cache in it, the Video card uses RAM when it runs out of video RAM, If one uses a shared memory arch. Then it only uses system RAM. the chipset, PCI cards, etc, etc, etc.

So why would one EVER want to limit RAM speed down to the CPU's bus speed. Also Intel cpu's are quad pumped! This is why they claim 1333mhz bus speeds on their latest and greatest. Even more data that is going to require even more bandwidth!

Enough blabbing now. I'll get those benchmarks posted sooner or later, just download sis soft sanrda and browse the memory benchmarks for your self.

The E6600 is a 1066MHz FSB CPU meaning that it has a max bandwidth of approx 8533MB/sec. A single stick of DDR2-800 running at 400MHz has a max throughput (aka bandwidth) of 6400MB/sec, but since most people run two sticks in dual channel mode, the max throughput is doubled to 12800MB/sec. Therefore the RAM throughput exceeds the CPU bandwidth by 4267MB/sec, or 50%.

As I tried to explain to Outlander in the other thread, if he wants to prove his theory, he's gonna have to back it up with the proper benchmark test results. Simply showing the results of a memory benchmark isn't gonna do it. I've conceded that the faster the RAM runs, the higher the throughput will be. But what good is having high RAM throughput if it exceeds the CPU's bandwidth by 50%?

The "raw" frequency is what you should be concerned with, not the FSB. The E6600 runs at 2.4GHz but notice that it's clock settings are 9 x 266MHz, NOT 2.25 x 1066MHz. The 1066MHz number is the "effective" bus speed due to "quad-pumping"...it's a theoretical number. 266MHz is the actual bus speed & THAT is the number you should be working with.

That being said, there's no reason not to get DDR2-800 (PC2-6400) RAM, but for best performance, you should manually adjust the BIOS to run the RAM at 266MHz (DDR2-533). Two sticks of DDR2-800 RAM running at 266MHz in dual channel mode will have a max throughput of 8533MB/sec, which is the same as the max bandwidth of a 1066MHz FSB CPU. This will run the CPU & RAM at 1:1 ratio...in other words, in sync!

@ Deimos,

You have an AMD system. There is no FSB so there's nothing to be in sync with.

Jam is dead on.

On an Intel system you want your FSB mhz and ram mhz to run nysc with one another.

On an AMD system you want your memory controller bandwidth and your rams bandwidth to run nysc with one another.

You don't want to have a bottleneck, because here is what happens if you do. Something is going to be waiting for something else to get finished, regardless if it's the ram that is faster then the FSB, or FSB that is faster then the ram. Same goes for memory controllers bandwidth. The memory controller that produces more memory bandwidth then the ram, or the ram that produces more memory bandwidth then the memory controller.