Q6600 Ram

[ikix]

Everyone says that you should get pc6400 RAM when buying a Q6600, but why?

[Fraz]

1) It's very cheap.
2) Because people erroneously think that you must only run with a 1:1 divider.
3) Faster RAM doesn't make that much difference, because Intel have already compensated for the horrific bottleneck caused by the memory subsystem in modern computers by putting a truly massive amount of level-2 cache in their CPUs.

[staffsMike]

Because it allows you to clock to 3.6GHz (arguably the q6600's limit on air) without an trouble. It's just stock speed for the ram.

[HSK]

1) It's very cheap.
2) Because people erroneously think that you must only run with a 1:1 divider.
3) Faster RAM doesn't make that much difference, because Intel have already compensated for the horrific bottleneck caused by the memory subsystem in modern computers by putting a truly massive amount of level-2 cache in their CPUs.

i've heard this alot...whats your view on it?

[DDY]

You don't need to use PC2-6400 with a Q6600. As staffsMike suggests you can achieve 3.6GHz on the Q6600 without overclocking the RAM, where with PC2-5300 for example you'd get to 3GHz without any problems but to go further you'd need to start overclocking the RAM making things a little more complicated.

In fact you only need PC2-4200 to 1:1, but this way you'd have to overclock the RAM to get anywhere with the CPU though.

[Fraz]

i've heard this alot...whats your view on it?

Not true anymore. Certainly used to be. You couldn't run the memory asynchronously on old AMD Athlons at all. It used to sort of work, but your PC would be horrifically unstable. You had to stick to 1:1.

I've been running my divider at 1:1.5 on my IP35 Pro with PC2-8500 RAM. So the FSB is at 333, and the RAM is at 1000 MHz (i.e. 333 * 2 * 1.5 = 1000).

Works absolutely fine, and definitely results in a faster memory subsystem.

[staffsMike]

1GB sticks seem to overclock a lot better than the 2GB sticks available so it's more risky buying 2GB which aren't designed to run the speed you require.

PC6400 are the safe bet with a Q6600 and given the price of the stuff, doesn't seem worth saving the pennies for PC5300 unless you dont want to overclock or are happy at 3.0GHz.

You certainly don't need to run 1:1 but it's nice to do it that way so everything is matched up but the speed you can get from different dividers is nice.