Front side bus

Hi.

I'm currently having something of a brain fart. If someone could help me figure out what the differences between the 1600MHz and 2000MHz FSB would be between two mainboards, both running the same Athlon64 x2 3800+ CPU and PC3200 memory, I'd really appreciate it. Basically, I'm comparing the nForce3 250Gb chipset to the VIA KT890Pro ...or something like that.

My thought would be that if I'm running PC3200 DDR memory, there wouldn't be any difference. ...Or am I wrong?

Thanks.

-mr moon

ORIGINAL: holderofthehorns

mr moon,

All the parts add up to the whole. FSB being the speed limit of the info highway internally.
Ram should be as fast as possible, but not everything needs to go to ram and wait there.

On similar machines, the one the the fastest FSB will outperform.

Years ago, we would race our pc's.
My friend had a 486-dx4-120. I had a 486-dx50.
His 120 should have outperformed, but the bus speed was only 30mhz.
The dx50 had a bus speed of 50mhz and transferred data 20mhz faster.
We had similar HD's and ram.

The test races included PKZipping identical data directories and copying identical copies.

The faster bus always won the races, much to our amazement.
I would bet the same principles hold true today.

I recently got a K8N mobo for my x64.
FSB is now 2000, up from 800 on the old Asus I had before.

Same PC except for the mobo. Now it is much faster.
Go for the FSB if you can, the parts add up to the whole.

Thanks. Kinda gets confusing with all the chipset subsets I'm dealing with now while I try to find a motherboard with the nForce3 Ultra chipset. I haven't had to dig into the FSB so much, so this is very helpful information!

Looks like I may get the MSI K8N Neo2-F board, as it has the quicker nForce 3 "Ultra" chipset rather than the slower "250GB" version.

Thanks!

-mr moon

ORIGINAL: Johnny1982
There will be no difference for audio applications between 1600mhz and 2000mhz... 1600 mhz it's more than enough... You bottleneck will be the cpu or the HDD speed.

This is true...

To further clarify, the 1600MHz / 2000MHz is not what would be classically called to Front Side Bus. In AMD systems that number refers to the hypertransport speed, which is used to connect the CPU to all I/O devices like the PCI / PCI-e busses, the southbridge I/O controller (which contains all IDE, SATA, USB, and in many cases ethernet and FW).

The term FSB was used when systems had the system RAM controller in a north bridge chip (Athlon XP, All Intel chips). The north bridge handles all memory access and the FSB is the speed the CPU is connected to the northbridge. Therefore, the faster the FSB, the faster the CPU can get data from RAM. The northbridge then has the data links to the I/O devices, so not only does RAM access have to run over the FSB, so does all I/O. That's why FSB is so very important on those types of systems. AMD decided to change that a bit though...

On the Athlon 64, the RAM is controlled and accessed directly by the CPU itself, so no matter what hypertransport speed, the RAM access speed will remain the same. The northbridge as it used to be called no longer exists.

So that means the only time the hypertransport is going to limit you is if you've got some massive I/O going on. Like say quad gigabit ethernet connections. In a DAW application, there's really nothing that will demand bandwidth that could possibly exceed that 1600MHz hypertransport.

in an amd64 system the HT or FSB speed is determined by the processor. all athlon X2 processors have the 1000Mhz hypertransport as opposed to the 800mhz, which makes the FSB 2000 Mhz. long story short, any mobo that works with the X2 will be 2000 Mhz

of course, be sure each of those motherboards supports the processor. not sure about the 250gb

. I've been reading online that the FSB speed will impact the RME FF800 I'm running, as it connects directly to the computer via a firewire PCI card connection rather than a standalone PCI card and breakout box, such as the EMU1820M uses.

I am suspecting FSB / Hypertranspor speed will affect performace at low latencies, hence my prior query / request. hehe

The problem, however, was that in initial benchmarks the first generation P4 was not that much faster and in some tests actually underperformed the fastest P3s.

this I am aware of.

as long as it's cost-effective

and this is the question - hehe