Modem Mhz...

[Alzarius]

Does anyone know what the significance of modem mhz is? My external USR Courier is 20.16 mhz. The ones that came after are 25 mhz or thereabouts. This doesn't seem to have made any difference in my ability to upgrade it to 56k(except that there are 2 files. 1 for 20mhz and 25 mhz) Are the 25mhz modems somehow...better? Faster? More reliable? I can't figure out what the mhz is related to in the modem and how 5 mhz would make some massive difference... Anyone have a clue or two?

[Comtech]

Any piece of hardware with a chip on it has a clock chip to run it at a certain speed.
As a modem clock chip is running at 20mhz or more, it's still tons faster than any 56k connect, so one will not out perform the other (20mhz vs 25mhz).
Video cards are an exception, because they rely on the clock to calculate framerates. The faster the clock, the more frames per second.
Overclocking a motherboard/chip, also increases the clock speed of the PCI bus, therefore, if you are running at 75 or 83 on a 66mhz chip, you are also running at 36.6 or 41.5 on the PCI bus, which is overclocking any card plugged into the PCi slots.
This will not help a modem or sound card run faster, and can sometimes cause them to fail, however it will cause a PCI video card to run faster, because the clock on (most)video cards runs at a multiple of the bus speed.
Clear as mud?
This does not apply to all video cards, motherboards, PCI bus configurations of course.

[Alzarius]

I knew about videocards and such, but I didn't understand what effect the 20-25mhz chip had on modems. So thanks very much. At least I now know that the modem chip isn't lagging behind the times. And since Analog isn't likely to go above 56k(Heck, who knows, maybe they'll find some way to do it!) I shouldn't have need to worry about this issue.