Intel's New Family of 800 MHz FSB Processors

Review by Michael Tran on 6.05.03
Managing Editor: Harry Lam
CPU Provided by Intel

The New 800MHz Front Side Bus:

Notice the dual-DDR (blue and black channels)

Intel has released its new 800MHz FSB family, but not many mainboards out on the market can support its bandwidth.  The 800MHz FSB offers 6.4 GB/s of memory bandwidth.  Most motherboards only offer single-channel DDR400 support which only delivers half of the bandwidth of what the 800MHz FSB handles.  Many of the latest motherboards out there on the market are now featuring dual-channel DDR400 support.  The Intel Springdale and Canterwood are the first of the chipsets to support dual-channel DDR400 for the Intel platform, but other chipset makers like SiS and VIA have chipsets under development to support both DDR400 and the 800MHz FSB bus. To correctly use dual-channel DDR, the user must match identical memory speeds or the memory will default to single-channel DDR speeds.  When using dual-DDR supported motherboards, the user should purchase two sticks of matching RAM rather than one stick of a larger size (i.e. Two 256MB sticks of DDR400 will outperform one 512MB stick of DDR400).  In short, these are the requirements for using dual-channel DDR:

1. Both sticks of memory must be the same size.

2. Both sticks of memory must have the same type of memory chips.

3. Both sticks of memory must have the same speed/latency.

4. Single-sided and double-sided memory sticks can not be mixed.