[INQ] Performance RAM will damage your Nehalem

[Blauhung]

There is no FSB on Nahalem, just like there is no FSB on an AMD processor. For Nahelem you can still adjust base frequency up a little to overclock but you may only be going from 133 to 150 or so.
My point was the worthless 600FSB+ we are seeing now is gone...the tricks played to get this bus speed that 99% of end users had no idea about and the implications it had on ram vendors brought about an FSB hate within me for the past 6 months. This was beside the fact that FCG along with Raja and Gary tried their upmost to educate the masses on why 450 or lower FSB with tight tRD was faster...no one seemed to listen though.



Now Blauhung is saying QPI multies are unlocked, much like they are on Phenoms HT, and memory multies (now im unsure here this could mean simple clock ratio's OR it could mean IMC clock speed...or of course it could mean both) so there are still ways you can eek out more speed here without having to push the ram to silly speeds with lots of voltage.

Im going to quote Phenom as I do not have i7 yet....there are 2 ways to push write speeds higher, 1 increase ram speed.. or leave ram speed lower and increase IMC speed. If you push ram speed higher and leave IMC speed low you are actually limiting how much performance the system will have AND limit how far the ram will OC. So if i7 is similar to K10 you will have to increase the IMC core clock to make running 2000mhz ram even worth it, BUT just increasing IMC core clock has the same effect as running 1 speed up on the memory.
Now...it may not completely work like this on i7, reviewers hopefully will explain to us all shortly, so watch out for talk of increasing IMC clock even with lower ram clocks but tight latencies maybe beating higher clock higher latency ram speeds.

Now here is the killer crunch, on desktop Nahelem may just have to much bandwidth even at 1067 or 1333, with the added width you may get the horn off the sandra bandwidth scores but you won't get the added FPS in games. So this is where tighter latencies will come into play, running 5-5-5- at 1333 over 7-7-7- may add a greater % of FPS in a game than running 8-8-8- or 9-9-9- at 1800+MHZ with higher vdimm. it may be better (if available) to increase IMC core clock sticking to 1333 ram speed and tighten latency...

All soon I hope will be revealed.

I'm unsure about how the IMC clock and Memory clock are implimented, but the bios screen from the smackover seems to show 2 clock multipliers for memory


I would guess that UCLK would be IMC clock multi, and it's somewhat obvious what "memory multiplier" means

also I hadn't found this posted but anandtech did a nice blog about memory voltage and how they already know some tricks to optimize a board for higher voltage (just can't tell us yet, stupid NDA). Just without those optimizations is where you run into the danger zone. As with all things, if you make it possible for people to break something, they will do it. And from a business standpoint if it's easy to do and you put no warning on your stuff, people will complain.
http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=3426
Edit: haha, just noticed that it was posted at the top of this page