RAM limitations on Winchester core Athlon64?

[8bit]

Hi all,

Thinking about upgrading to 2Gb RAM in my gaming rig. I have an Athlon 64 3500 Winchester and seem to remember something about a RAM issue with that chip, does it happen:

1) When running with 2Gb installed or
2) With 4 sticks of RAM installed

and does the issue reduce the frequency the memory runs at, have I got that right?

TIA
8bit

[[DW]Cougho]

its the 4 sticks of RAM installed. Takes you back to 166mhz on the memory.

[herulach]

But even with 1gb sticks you usually have to drop to 2t

[8bit]

But even with 1gb sticks you usually have to drop to 2t

2t? not sure what you mean...

[SilentDeath]

I have a pc with 2x crucial 1gb sticks running fine at 1T.

Maybe with some ram you will need 2T and it might limit how far the fsb can increase but at 200mhz it shouldnt be a problem for most cpus/ram I think.

I know some boards set 166mhz with 4 sticks - but do they also force 2T? would decreasing ram to 166 be enough to run 4 sticks at 1T?
Which would perform better?

If 166-1T is better than 200-2T, would it still be better than 225-2T? (which is what Im running now). the other timings are probably important aswell, but for the sake of simplicity lets say its at 2-3-3-7 for the above 3.

[herulach]

AS far as im aware it depends on the number of actual physical ram chips, some 1GB sticks have lots of low density ones, where as some have fewer high density, the high density are the better ones.

2T is whats called the command rate, god knows what it actually references, but basically 1t >2T by a fair margin.

On athlon 64s it certainly seems that more mhz can make up for the latency, i'd hook you up with eclipses extensive studies on it over at the [H] but im not on my own box. for those options you listed id take the fastest first, but youd have to bench it properly of course.

[Dougal]

The "T" value defines how many clock cycles for each read/write.

So obviously 1T is twice as fast as 2T.