DDR2 800 memory okay for Intel E7400 ?

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vronp
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DDR2 800 memory okay for Intel E7400 ?

Post by vronp » Mon Aug 17, 2009 5:10 pm

Hi all,

Is there any downside to using DDR2 800 memory with an Intel E7400 ? I have some sticks laying around and was wondering about this. Or, do I need to go out and buy DDR2 1066 ? I'm not sure I understand the processor guts well enough to understand the impact.

Mobo is ASUS P5N7A-VM

thanks for any tips,
Dave

swivelguy2
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Post by swivelguy2 » Mon Aug 17, 2009 6:00 pm

Your memory will work just fine. DDR2-1066 might perform a little better (like 5% or so) in certain memory-bandwidth-intensive tasks, but other than that, there's no difference.

In fact, according to Newegg, your motherboard doesn't support any memory speeds higher than DDR2-800 anyway, so there would be no point in upgrading.

40974111
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Post by 40974111 » Tue Aug 18, 2009 1:38 am

No throughput advantage if you set the RAM divider to 1:1, but the 1066 could allow you to drop the latencies more if you ran it at 1:1.

vronp
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Post by vronp » Tue Aug 18, 2009 5:18 am

Thanks guys. I appreciate the info.

jessekopelman
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Re: DDR2 800 memory okay for Intel E7400 ?

Post by jessekopelman » Tue Aug 18, 2009 12:25 pm

vronp wrote:I'm not sure I understand the processor guts well enough to understand the impact.
The thing that seems to get people confused is that neither RAM nor CPU are advertised at their fundamental FSB clock speed. In the case of CPU, Intel advertises 4X the fundamental clock (eg 1066 => 266.7 MHz). DDR2 RAM is advertised at 2X the fundamental clock (eg 800 => 400 MHz). So, keeping this in mind, DDR2-800 is actually faster than you need for a 1:1 memory divider (you only need DDR2-533). However, you might as well get the DDR2-800 since it is nice and cheap these days and it may allow for: running at a higher divider, running 1:1 at lower latencies, overclocking the FSB of the CPU and keeping a 1:1 divider without changing the RAM timings or voltage. The overclocking thing is the one important to most people. A FSB overclock of 266.7 to 400 (as theoretically supported by using DDR2-800 with a 1066FSB CPU) would be a 50% overclock -- a lot more than you are likely to get without some extreme overvolting.

line
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Post by line » Tue Aug 18, 2009 1:15 pm

I've once bookmarked this post, a very nice explanation by Prototyped:

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/for ... 0004587831

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