Pushing the Mushkin Memory Farther
This content was originally featured on Amdmb.com and has been converted to PC Perspective’s website. Some color changes and flaws may appear.
What would a review of this memory be without a little overclocking action? Pretty worthless if you ask me! 🙂 How do you go about overclocking your memory? Simple: increase your front-side bus. Besides being a way to overclock your processor, every time you increase your FSB, you are increasing the speed at which the memory works. Assuming you have memory settings at FSB + 33, running at a 100 MHz FSB (default) produces the 133 MHz memory bus that we used for all the previous tests. Now, however, we are moving beyond that. For example, running your FSB at 110 MHz forces your memory to work at 143 MHz. If the memory can handle it, the higher the FSB, the better your memory tests are going to benchmark.I’ll go ahead and give it away: the highest we could get the FSB to run stable was 112 MHz, meaning we had the memory running at 145 MHz, which is fairly impressive. I am confident that the Athlon processor was at fault in the stability issue at higher bus speeds, though I can’t be positive. I have a feeling that I could this Mushkin memory to run at speeds close to 160 MHz if the system would allow it.
So, running your PC133 memory at 145MHz, what kind of results can you expect? Well look below for our results.
As you can see, the increased FSB creates a tremendous increase in memory performance. This is why overclocking your system via the FSB and the multiplier produces the best overall results.
Quake III really takes advantage of the extra memory bandwidth available to it. The increase of 15 fps for changing your FSB is a tremendous gain for any gaming machine.
Once again, we see that though there is still an increase in performance, it is not nearly as impressive as again the GeForce 2 GTS card becomes a bottleneck for the frame rate.
