ECS K7S5A Pro RAM Settings

[fern]

tonite i noticed my programs were starting to get a lil choppy. went into bios and saw some settings regarding ram. I was using PNY sdram, before i upgraded to crucial DDR.

Mainboard: ECS K7S5A Pro
Cpu: Athlon XP 2000
Video: Rage 128
O/S: WinXP
RAM: DDR400 (PC3200) • 512mb • CL=3 • Unbuffered • Non-parity • 5ns • 2.5V • 64Meg x 64

i used crucial's memory wizard. from the list, i saw that crucial's pc3200 was compatible with the my mainboard. i thought this was strange, because the mainboard manual said pc2100 or pc2700. i ordered the stick and installed it. it was detected and it works...but it's a bit choppy from time to time. here are the options i saw in bios:

SDR/DDR Cas Latency: (3)
SDR/DDR RAS Active Time: (7t)
SDR/DDR RAS Precharge Time: (4t)

I checked the CL speed from crucial's website and set the CL to 3. the ras active time is set to '7t' and the precharge time is set to '4t'. what should they be with my setup?

EDIT: i know my video card sucks :P

[DallasDon]

For starters, that board runs at 100 MHZ, or 133 MHZ, which is in sync with PC 2100 or 2700, as the manual stated.

To tweak it further, you may need a Bios flash, which you may or may not want to do.

The PC 3200 will work, but Underclocked to DDR 266.

You might want to try to load the Performance Defaults, and

learn more about that board before trying an overclock.

[Peter M]

Usually, RAM that is rated CL3 at PC3200 (200 MHz) safely runs CL2 at PC2100 (133 MHz). Same for the remaining timing settings - a DIMM that reaches so much further up in clock should be perfectly fine with most aggressive timings at this much lower clock.
When you've set everything up (lower numbers are faster), run the test software from www.memtest86.com overnight to see whether you've pushed it too far.

[fern]

since i don't know alot about bios and all that junk, i'm going to avoid flashing the bios. i guess, i'm gonna change my timing settings to as fast as possible. if i remember, i'll post results.
thanks

UPDATE:
it's a lot smoother. thanks for the help guys

[pickel]

Go into the bios setup and load " Optimized defaults" and see what happens.
That should set all your hardware for optimized performance