Nate is correct -- but this downclocking of memory also depends on your
BIOS, which actually determines how to clock RAM.
For example, Opterons Rev. E or later can drive at most 6 ranks of
memory at full DDR400 speed, says AMD's BIOS and kernel developer
manual. This would imply that 4 dual-rank DIMMs would have to be
downclocked to DDR333. This is what typical BIOS would do as the default.
However, the actual speed limit depends on electrical loading. Provided
that the CPU, motherboard, and RAM cooperate sufficiently well, it isn't
necessary to downclock memory. For example, HP's BIOS in xw9300 doesn't.
This issue causes much confusion and I wished that manufacturers could
explain it better. Unfortunately, since the actual limit depends on the
CPU revision, physical motherboard properties, and RAM characteristics;
most BIOSes follow AMD's conservative recommendation and downclock 8
ranks of memory even when they could operate reliably at full speed.
Sincerely,
Josip
Nate Faerber wrote:
On Thu, 2006-02-02 at 14:05 -0600, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Hello, computer gurus -
do any of you know if the AMD Opteron downrates the PC3200 400 MHz DIMMS
(DDR400) to 333 MHz (DDR333) performance when the system has more that 2
Gbytes of memory installed?
i was told that when an opteron socke has more that 2GBytes of memory, then
the cpu will automatically downrate the memory rate to an equivalence of
DDR333 memory.
It doesn't necessarily depend on the amount of memory installed. It
depends on the total number of ranks in your memory DIMMs which is
likely determined by the number of DIMMs installed. You get downclocked
to PC2700 once you hit 8 ranks total on a memory controller (one per
Opteron CPU.) So you could get 4GB of RAM on a processor if you use
single ranked DIMMs.
See section 4.1.3.4 here:
http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/white_papers_and_tech_docs/26094.PDF
Find previous coverage of this subject here:
http://beowulf.org/archive/2005-July/013377.html
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