Nubius I will be willing to take that 3200 off your hands if you are trying to get rid of it. What do you say $50 sound pretty good?
Ehh, no, it's a $200 CPU....technically $190 now since it's been out a few months, but the 3000 venice is $150 so why would I sell a 3200 for $50? Beyond that, I don't think I'm going to go through the hassle of getting the 3000...I had thought about it, about a month ago, but I think now I'm going to try and sell my 6800GT to a friend here in town and cut my losses, get the PCI-E version and get the Ultra-D board instead of this DFI NF3 board that sucks.
vaderpro - the 3000 isn't a 'weak link' in his system...it would be if he left it at stock but I assume being that the thread says 'ram and cpu OCability' that he's going to OC it.
Rcr and Idiotec - No 1:1 isnt important to some degree...it's important if you're down at stock PC3200 levels, and it was of course more important for the K7 generation of AMD processors but not so much anymore.
Suppose you get the 3000 and stock it's 200x9 = 1.8GHz....aright, now lets suppose your RAM OC's up to DDR540 speeds...270MHz....Now lets suppose you know your CPU can hit 2.7GHz (this is all hypothetical of course, just follow along for a bit) well 270x9 is only 2.430GHz....
this is where the 1:1 isn't important...you use a divider so you can get your HTT up to where it needs to be for your CPU to be running 2.7GHz...in this case it'd need to be 300....So you'd need to set your HTT to 300 for 300x9 = 2.7GHz, then you'd need a memory divider so that it only runs the memory at 270MHz and not 300...
Don't get me wrong...of COURSE if you could run both the RAM and CPU at 300MHz that'd be nice...but it's not so much because you NEED to run it at that, but rather you'd get a helluva lot more memory bandwidth at 300MHz over 270MHz obviously....but when the system is running up at that high 1:1 isn't important as both your CPU and RAM are running incredibly fast and efficient as it is.
With the older K7 boards maxing out at 400FSB then it'd be a serious bottleneck to say...have a 400FSB CPU but only putting in PC2700 RAM...it'd just be killing your CPU...but in a scenario with the CPU running 300HTT with an overall speed of 2.7GHz and your RAM running at DDR540 it doesn't hurt it one bit.