Suppose I oc'd my system (e8400 3ghz) to 422X9 (3800MHZ) fsb: dram ratio 1:1 this means 422X2= 844 MHZ (used by my ram) BUT, my ram is 1066 mhz (533X2)! does this mean that my ram does not utilize it's full speed ability? Or am I getting this all wrong... (but if I'm right, then why should I buy ram faster than 800 MHZ???) Thanx!
your ram is the bottleneck in your setup. as your systme bus is set at over 1600mhz =12.8GB/s and your memory bus frequency is set at just over 8GB/s. so your best getting 2x 800mhz memory modules in dual channel configuration so it matches the frequency of your system bus. It's best to go for the higher memory bus frequency if you do alot of gaming, if you don't game much but use alot of apps then slightly slower speed ram and better cas timings are better for your system, also alot of cpu memory cache is also a big boost in system performance. My system setup is a q6600 with the following setup, 400x4 =1600mhz system bus and 400x9 = 3.6ghz each core, I havn't gone above 1600mhz system bus because i know that's the maximum my motherboard supports. You should also double check on your setup that your board supports 1600mhz + system bus frequency. my memory bus is set at 800mhz x2 because of dual channel = 1600mhz, so it matches my system bus frequency. All that i've done then is drop the cas timings down to 4-4-4-15 so i've got good bandwidth for gaming and also lower cas timings for apps also 8mb of L2 cache.
