200 mhz fsb

[LilDan]

Hello all, I've been doing allot of work on my system as of late, after reading up on things and trying to learn the bios on my system and how to work with it. I have a few questions that I cannot seem to answer and am wondering if maybe one of you folks can.

My system:
Asus k7v Mother Board
800MHZ Athlon
256 Meg SDRAM (2dimms)
Western Digital 13.6 Gig HD
Western Digital 1.2 Gig HD
40x CD-ROM
Diamond Stealth xtreme S540 AGP 32 Meg AGP video card
Linksys 10/100 PCI LAN card

I was looking around in my bios today to get my agp card to work in agp 4X mode, apparently asus likes to hide their new bios patches :-) and noticed that my front side bus is registering at 100MHZ. The Asus k7V is supposed to be a 200 MHZ FSB, is that 100 mhz reading in the bios correct, is there a clock multiplier that I have missed as of yet?

Just looking for some info so I know what my system can do, and how I can best upgrade my system.

Thanks in advance,

LilDan

[darkclaw]

The 200Mhz is kinda missleading. It's really 100Mhz at DDR. You'll notice your mulitplier is probably like 8.5.

[LilDan]

My clock multiplier is 8.0 and I do not believe my motherboard is designed to work with DDR memmory, unless I was told wrong DDR memmory uses a different size slot than SDRAM. The only DIMM slots on my motherboard are for SDRAM.

If anyone has any clue about what I'm asking here please clue me in, I'm a little lost here. Need any other information about my system just ask here, i'll check back later.

Thanks for the help


LilDan

[darkclaw]

Ok how about I try wording this differently so that I'm clear. No your board is not using DDR ram. The 200 mhz fsb only exists between the CPU and the Northbridge chip on the motherboard. As you noticed 8 x 100 = 800. As far as the motherboard is concerned it runs at 100mhz. Which it really does. But between the CPU and Northbridge that 100Mhz is Double Data Rate (DDR) which is seen as 200Mhz by those two chips. If you'll notice 8 x 200 = 1600.

[LilDan]

Ahh ok, I was told wrong by some one else then. An aquantaince of mine told me that ddr memmory was different than SDRAM and actually ran at 200 MHZ between the processor and the memmory. Thought maybe I had a setting on my mobo that could be changed to make this happen. Apparently not, thanks for your time.

LilDan

[Peter M]

LilDan, your idea of how things are connected is wrong, that's the confusion.

There is no direct connection between CPU and RAM. The CPU connects to the chipset, and the chipset connects to AGP, PCI and the RAM on a separate bus for each.

On Athlon/Duron, the CPU bus is always DDR, at 100 or 133 MHz. Mark E. Ting often refers to that as 200 or 266 MHz, which is technically wrong but looks better in ads.

Same thing for the RAM bus. With most chipsets, the speed here doesn't need to be the same as on the CPU bus. Usually yo get 100 or 133 MHz SDRAM - or DDR at 100, 133 and very soon also 166 MHz, with same marketing stunt of saying 200 to 333 MHz instead.

So, your BIOS reading saying the CPU bus is at 100 MHz with the CPU internally running an 8x multiplier is perfectly fine.

regards, Peter