Memory upgrade required for T40 Dothan upgrade?

[SteveS]

I ran a search and have read many, but not all of the 118 posts that came up for “T40 Dothan”

No one seams to mention upgrading memory as well, which confuses me. The Dothan 7xx series have a 400 MHz front side bus. Standard memory in a T41 or T42 is PC2700-333 MHz. (already seems to be limiting FSB speed).
Standard memory in a T40 is PC2100-266 MHz. It would seem to me that the PC2100 memory would not keep up with the faster FSB speed, or am I missing something here?

Is the memory bus speed fixed by the system board, or does it “speed step” up faster when a different processor is detected?

If the memory speed is fixed by the system board, is there really any great performance improvement for a Banias to Dothan upgrade in a T40? I assume the core architecture of the Dothan gives some performance improvement over the Banias, even running at the same speed. Is this true?

I am looking at upgrading T40 from 1.6 Banias to 1.8 Dothan (would jump to 2 GHz, but the cost of the processor pushes my investment in the PC beyond its practical value). I have already upgraded the HD to 7200 RPM.

[FTC]

Hi, upgrading memory is not *required*, your T4x will work flawlessly with PC2100 (at PC2100 speed though), that is 266Mhz. If you had PC2700 the mainboard/chipset would be configured for PC2700 speeds (300Mhz memory bus). Note that the FSB is the bus speed between the CPU and the northbridge, and this is different from the northbridge/memory speed.

In other words, no problem at all. You can upgrade the memory when ugrading to dothan processor, but it is not required, nor really a 'feature' of the processor and the gains will be minimal... (not really worth it).

[aaa]

It's not like 400mhz ram is even supported anyways, max is pc2700. And the Banias is 400mhz as well. The different memory speeds make little difference.

[sktn77a]

The memory bus and front side bus are separate. Your T40 has 266MHz memory bus but you probably won't notice much difference from a system with a 333MHz memory bus in everyday computing. You can upgrade to a Dothan (larger cache, lower power consumption and runs cooler) regardless of the memory speed. Upgrading from a 1.6 Banias to a 1.8 Dothan would probably not be worthwhile. You'd need a 2.0 or 2.1 to even notice the increase (and then only on CPU intesive activities like video processing/encoding).

[awolfe63]

Just to be clear. A T40 runs its memory at 266MHz - no matter which CPU and no matter if you put in PC2100, PC2700, or PC3200 SODIMMS. There is no reason to upgrade memory speed.