New Ram - Memory Bus Speed Dilemma

[congo]

Here's one for the experts.

I just bought a 512mb stick of PC2700 DDR RAM, a generic brand because I'm a cheapskate.

I had 2 x 256 PC2100 DDR sticks in before which  were also generic ram and they showed good benchmarks in SiSoftSandra at standard bios settings (by SPD).

My Motherboard is an Asus A7S333 which has a FSB speed of 266mhz with an AMD XP 1800+ CPU in the middle. The motherboard is supposed to support a memory clock speed of 333mhz for PC2700 RAM and being a well known and popular board, I don't doubt that it does.

The problem is that my performance and benchmark results are slightly down with the PC2700 upgrade and SiSoftSandra is still showing Ram speed at 266mhz, whether an error or not.

The benchmark actually shows worse memory bandwidth than my PC2100 RAM. 3DMark scores are also down slightly.

I have tried:

Flashing to several versions of BIOS and Several different BIOS configurations as well as SPD and manual BIOS settings

Running my old PC2100  together with the new PC2700 for a total of 1 gig ram showed Bandwidth Performance EQUAL to
or slightly better than my original PC2100 configuration.

So, Does anyone know what's going on? I'm feeling really dumb again.

[Brett_Henderson]

I had an ASUS A7S333 not long ago. Great board, but the one thing I remember is that even if ALL your memory is 2700, using the 3rd slot makes it all go back to 266 speed.

I also seem to remember that even back with PC133 / 100

[Selbio]

I have the same motherboard and I just ordered two 512 PC2700 sticks from www.crucial.com. It does say in the manual that it's recommended to use the name brands that hey have listed.

Nanya
Samsung
Micron
Kingmax


This is a great board but soon I'm going to get rid of it since it has issues with the on-board sound. Even after disabling the on-board sound it still gave me problems with the SB Live! that I had. I just hope that the memory chips do work on there otherwise I'm going to be pissed.

[Selbio]

Today I received the two 512 PC2700 chips and using the the sisoftware it still showed it was running at 266 mhz.

Using 3dmark2001 se the score dropped from 10200 to 9797.

I remember that back when I had only 512 ddr pc2100 ram and upgraded to 768 it didn't make a whole lot of difference, in fact the score was over 10000 and upgrading to 768 ram at that time it dropped lol.

However, eventhough it says 266mhz using sisoftware performance went up a noticeable bit.