Does cache really make a difference in Core 2 Duos?

[aspire]

I was running 1:1 is there anything that favors the ram more than that?

 

[dario03]

Dude...its Mid-January right now. And companies rarely, if ever, release the products at the beginning of the quarter. They pick a quarter, and then push to the farthest end of it for release. In most cases, atleast. In any case, Q2 is neither "next week," nor "soon" so stick to saying that they come out in April->June, or Q2.

Lol, second semester will "soon" be over when my first hasn't even fully ended yet. Amusing.

Easy there killer. I never said it was coming out next week and I can consider Q2 soon if I want to.

 

[Nagasama]

I was running 1:1 is there anything that favors the ram more than that?

no. but you have the possibility of higher stable overclocks if your ram speed is set down (i.e. ddr2-667 from ddr2-800).
that usually helps when you are shooting for super high overclocks with the c2d. i dont have to because i don't run my 4200's clock high enough every day to top out my xms.
also, i read somewhere recently that the c2d are not like the older intels that favored the 1:1 ratio. i don't believe that it is nearly as important to have the fsb/dram run at the same speed now because of the new architecture of c2d.
help me out intel people...?

 

[aspire]

well i have my ddr2-800 pushed past stock speeds up to what = ddr2-830

I think ive gotten mine stable enough for everyday use at 3.6ghz
this is all on water tho.

 

[TriEclipse]

I was running 1:1 is there anything that favors the ram more than that?

Isn't 1:1 considered standard? And I'm not sure what you mean by "favors the RAM." In this case, you're trying to lower the speed of the RAM, compared to the FSB.

I don't know if some motherboards are entirely incapable of them, but there should be dividers as low as 5:4 or 3:2. with a 5:4 divider, you could get 3.5Ghz on the E6300 with 400Mhz RAM. 4Ghz could be achieved with 457Mhz memory, DDR2-914. Not extremely common, but more so than a 4Ghz E6300.

@ Nagasama; The 1:1 being more favorable is indeed true, and is still present in the Core 2 Duos. The lack of an Integrated Memory Controller (IMC) on the CPU die means that the memory is not in perfect sync with the CPU as it is in AMD's K8 systems. With AMD, you could change the dividers around and you wouldn't see any performance loss except for that from possibly slower-running memory. With Intel processors, its not quite as favorable.

It used to be a big deal, and everybody was encouraged to steer away from not using a 1:1 ratio, but I believe Anandtech did some testing that showed that the performance loss from something other than a 1:1 ratio was not significant. Atleast, not significant enough to be a deterrent to the higher speeds gained through overclocking. I've never been able to find where they did the testing, but apparently some really influential people are convinced that the performance loss isn't significant.

 

[Nagasama]

^^roger that^^
anandtech is where i read about the performance difference being negligible...i guess the article was dispelling the earlier notion that 1:1 was absolutely what you wanted to do....