New
#1
AMD system RAM speed question
I'm a little confused. I have three AMD systems in the house, 2 on Win7 and 1 on Vista. My own system is Phenom based, and the RAM clocks at either 800 MHz or 1066 MHz, just like it should. As reported by CPU-Z.
In my wife's machine (Asrock N-68, Athlon X2 4000) her DDR2 800 clocks at 740 MHz, and the Media Center Machine (Asus M2N-E, Athlon 3500+) clocks DDR2 667 RAM at 630 MHz. I'm not sure why this happens. CPU-Z reports the proper SPD of both sets of RAM, but it doesn't reach it's actual speed without pushing the FSB up a little, and thus OCing the CPU. I've confirmed the speed discrepancy with Everest and PC Wizard. The BIOS for both says that the RAM is running at it's rated speed
My system has an AMD chipset, but the others have an Nvidia chipset. Is it the chipset, or is there a quirk in the Athlon memory controller that I don't understand? It isn't a big performance hit, but it is weird. Anybody else ever see this happen?