The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.

    Memory and CPU fsb in sync?

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by oscamaya, May 8, 2006.

  1. oscamaya

    oscamaya Notebook Guru

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    61
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    15
    Are there benefits of running memory and CPU fsb in sync?
    Will the laptop be more stable so?
    Should I avoid NOT running them in sync?

    Cheers
     
  2. miner

    miner Notebook Nobel Laureate

    Reputations:
    1,326
    Messages:
    7,137
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    205
    Running in sync with the FSB will allow the cpu to theoretically use all of the available bandwidth. At most you"ll see 2 - 3% performance differential(assuming that you upgraded the memory from a lower speed to match the bus speed). Other than this there is no real disadvantage to running the memory at lower or faster speed.

    There wont be any stability issues. Infact most manufacturers ship laptops with DDR2 533 rather than DDR2 667 memory in most Intel Core Duo systems(which has FSB of 667MHz). So, there wont be any issues.
     
  3. qwester

    qwester Notebook Virtuoso

    Reputations:
    366
    Messages:
    2,755
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    55
    It's not only matching speeds (MHz), but also memory latency which comes into play in real life applications.

    As miner mentioned, although some manufacturers are going with the slower 533MHz, the loss in performance is not that large (if at all) because slower memory have an advantage over faster memory when it comes to latency.