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#11
Whs, again bear in mind that the 667MHz of RAM was on the motherboard all along with the E2180 and later on with the E7500.
You match the processor to its standard RAM supported speed and type of RAM (if you can). So I have DDR2 memory in an older system so bought an AM2+ board and an AM3 CPU - everything works at the best possible speed with 800MHz RAM. If this were a new system I'd buy a DDR3 board with an AM3 CPU @ 1333MHz - which is the native supported speed.
You also check to make sure you have the latest BIOS update and the CPU is supported by the motherboard revision.
Yeah, as suspected (by myself, no concrete evidence though), there could be a huge bottleneck with the CPU's 3MB of 1066MHz cache meeting the 667MHz RAM down the line.
BIOS is definitely the most recent one and the CPU is supported.
ps. I wanted to try 1066MHZ DDR3 but the motherboard doesn't support it.
DDR2 Cas 4 800 / DDR2 Cas5 1066 and DDR3 1066 are all about the same. (DDR2 will likely do better at these speeds in fact due to lower latencies)
Differences only being in a benchmark.
For 1066 speeds and Intel ((At least socket 775 DDR2)) , in most cases youll need to overclock the FSB/CPU to actually use it at that speed.
And being as the memory performance itself isnt that much difference, the only reason to go beyond DDR2 800 is if you are overclocking ((Generally))
IMHO, DDR3 only makes sense on a new build and at 1333 or more as it has enough speed to counter the higher latencies DDR3 brings.