Similar System Benchmarks Wanted - Potential Bottleneck

[Shinypaper]

First off I'm new here so hi guys

So I decided to do some memory benchmarks with MaxxMem and I'm a little concerned about the speed, it looks a little slow to me for DDR3 1600 at 9-9-9-24. The other reason I'm a bit concerned I'm being bottlenecked here is because I'm using an older chipset that only has hypertransport 1.0 (1000 Mhz) while my CPU supports hypertransport 3.0 (3000 Mhz) - maybe this is holding my memory back?

Anyway, I'm looking for anyone who may have a similar setup to me to post some benchies of their memory with MaxxMem so I can decide if it's worth getting a new board if it is indeed bottlenecking me.

Thanks in advance guys

Link to my build --> http://goo.gl/2O87h

Benchies below.

[Tradesman]

Bottleneck in part may be you are in unganged mode....try in ganged mode

[Shinypaper]

Hey Tradesman, thanks for the reply.

Tried ganged and unganged on more than one occasion. Same thing each time, not much difference. Still seems too low.

There's something interesting here btw about the way the a multi-core CPU interacts with the memory using unganged mode that had me in favor of using it. http://goo.gl/Jxtbo

What do you think?

Benchies in ganged mode below.

[Tradesman]

Not sure of how your BIOS is set up, but might try increasing the NB freq or raise the HT some, which should increase bandwidth, It doesn't appear to be to far off from others posted here:

http://www.gskill.us/forum/showthread.php?t=10545

Zila has 15, 356 with a 965, @ 4.6 with the NB at 2760 and the sticks at 1840 (stock 1600 sticks)

[Shinypaper]

I tried lowering the multiplier and raising the FSB a bit instead, saw some improvements but only negligible. What concerns me the most is the fact I'm only able to get HT 1 speeds on this board because of the old chipset, maybe it's that making it bottleneck, or it could just be my CPU itself, not sure. HT does go up with the FSB, but I can't get it very far without it becoming unstable. tried multiple timings, clock speeds, and voltages on the RAM to get some stability but it hasn't worked. also I've tried raising the northbridge as high as I can, I got to about 2000mhz before it started getting unstable and didn't seem to have any other effects. I still think it's just the old chipset with HT 1 causing it but I'm not sure exactly what sort of impact that has on the RAM.

[Shinypaper]

Quick update - I tried again with the NB frequency and a little bit of FSB for good measure and holy fudge - seems to be working. The last time I tried raising the NB was before a bios update so that could be something to do with it. Strange though because I thought the northbridge only needed to be as high as the ram clock speed - matching them made sense, I don't get how it can benefit from having more bandwidth than the ram wants. Anyway, massive improvements

[Tradesman]

Looking good!

[GSKILL TECH]

NB Frequency should be minimum 3X DRAM bus frequency.

827 x 3 = 2481MHz and right now you have it set to 2688MHz, so it is definitely sufficient.

Before you had it set to 1600MHz, so much too bottlenecked.

Thank you
GSKILL TECH

[Shinypaper]

Okay guys, thanks for all your help

[Tradesman]

No problem, keep us updated and in touch