Intel Core 2 "Conroe" Memory Settings Guide

Vote: Thumbs Down or Thumbs Up  

Introduction

The last time that memory latencies and possible impacts of using memory with higher latencies was only really emphasised back when the Intel Pentium 3 was available from the retail stores.

Intel’s Pentium 4 architecture was one of the most bandwidth hungry - if you shoved DDR into it with a 400MHz rate with extremely low latencies, the system would perform worse then if it had 433MHz memory with higher latencies. Pentium 4 was just so memory hungry that higher MHz was better than lower latencies.

AMD’s Athlon 64 processors on Socket 939 however were not a CPU where bandwidth was an issue. Due to the on CPU memory controller, the lower the latencies, the more power you would get out of the Athlon 64 platform.

Now Intel has finally scrapped the Netburst architecture in favour of something that actually performs, namely the Core architecture. Today we are going to do some more testings on our Core 2 processor to see if running with lower latencies helps on the Core 2 over higher clocked with higher latencies.

What has Intel done this time? Let’s find out as we aim to provide you with a guide into Conroe memory settings.