ooookay. tell me what you think. Athlon XP-M 2200+, 35W, 512K L2 Cache ABIT NF7-S 2x256MB of: Mushkin Level One PC3500 ($158) OR Geil Ultra Series PC3500 ($137) 2-3-3 2.5 6-3-3 SX1040BII| Case Fans: 2xRear 80mm, 1xFront 80mm ~ 30 CFM each Thermaltake Extreme Volcano 12 Arctic Silver 5 so, I would like to get that proc to something around 11.5*216 = 2484... is this achievable with that cooling? which set of ram do i want? is 512mb to little? Alternative setup.... keep the 2x512 of corsair value select pc3200 ($156) and go for something like 12*200 which im guessing would be more stable. the thing is, i feel like the 35W XP-M and nf7-s have great potential so I should take advantage of it.
Looks good, although the lower the memory timings you can get (and you probably can't get any better for the price). I'd probably go with GeiL since they offer a lifetime warranty on their RAM, but don't forget Mushkin as they're supposed to be very good as well. I wouldn't get anything less than 512MB these days, although if you can swing it, 1GB would be highly advisable. Overclocking is luck, but assuming the CPU doesn't become the bottleneck, that's possible.
i'm not so sure that the 2200 is a good chip for o'cing. i advise that you get a better or easier to o'c cpu and get pc3200 ram instead. the 2500 barton is the most popular choice for o'cers cuz of the multiplier. is that the abit NF7 rev 2? i also think you might be better off just getting one 512mb stick rather than 2 to let you dual channel with one gigabyte later on. that would be a more future proof choice.
That CPU is a mobile, and has much lower wattage than the standard Athlon. Part of the enemy in overclocking is heat, so if you can start off with less of that in the first place...all the better.
hmmm.... these boards are all for ddr400... but can they do the 7.0 GB/sec? if not, i should stick to pc3200 right?
I believe the XP-M 2500+, 35W can do 3200 without any problems, I've seen people get 2.5Ghz+ with them! on good air cooling (Thermalright SP97 + Smartfan 2)
The only problem I see with the sp97 is its price at $70 cad :swt: Other than that, it seems to be the best there is as far as air cooling goes.
Unlike the P4's, memory faster than PC3200 is largely wasted because the Athlon doesn't scale like crazy like the P4 does. The P4 is made to scale to very high clock speeds. AMD has more work going on per clock cycle, so they don't always go as high. Last I checked, AMD has yet to produce a CPU 3GHz or faster. PC3500 can run at 433MHz, rendering 3.5GB/s max speed. If it's in dual channel where you can make use of the 433MHz speed, then yes, 7.0GB/s is possible. However, this is a theoretical maximum. Yes, you can get it to run at PC3500 speeds, but with the Athlons, and especially on the nForce chipsets, running the FSB and memory asynchronously actually lowers overall performance. PC3200 with lower timings is best for the Athlon system. Going with a car analogy, some cars accelerate faster than others, and this is a very similar idea behind memory timings, except, it's a lot easier to adjust the memory timings. Of course, there is a downside. Not all memory can do lower timings at higher speeds, and you generally have to pay some extra $$ for the low lantency stuff. Now, if you're not operating at PC3500 speeds, you may be able to achieve lower timings at a slower speed than what it's rated for.
