NF7-S v2 1T CMD rate

[Terrahawk]

I recently upgraded my Athlon XP system with an Abit NF7-S 2.0, and apart from a dodgy northbridge fan, it's great. However, I can't seem to run my RAM at 1T command rate - SiSoft Sandra 2005 is always telling me that it's at 2T, no matter what I set the BIOS to.

Can anywaone tell me how to set the motherboard up to use a 1T command rate for the RAM?

[The_Ghost]

what ram are you using ?

[Terrahawk]

CL-2.5 DDR-400, Apacer brand. I am running it at DDR-333 speeds since I am not overclocking my Athlon XP-2500 at this stage. I am just wondering if I can get the 1T settings for when I get myself some decent RAM.

[The_Ghost]

when you go back in your bios , is it still set for 1t or 2t ?

[Terrahawk]

There is no 1T or 2T command rate setting in the bios, only the other four numbers, which are set 2.0-3-3-6.

[The_Ghost]

SiSoft Sandra 2005 is always telling me that it's at 2T, no matter what I set the BIOS to.

i ran sisoft sandra and i can't even see where it give the command rate in it

which part of the benchmark test did your show it under , i'm testing it on a 3200 k7 nf2

[Terrahawk]

It's a part of "Mainboard Information", under "Logical/Chipset 1 Memory Banks". Mine says 256MB DDR-SDRAM 2.0-3-3-7 2CMD, for both banks.

[The_Ghost]

mine says the same , and i have a good set of corsair memory , on a asus a7n8x deluxe motherboard

so i guess we can't change that

[Terrahawk]

That's a bummer... I was reading a document by Corsair (AN 501: Latency Settings and their Impact on Memory Performance) that examined the effects of varying the RAM timings, and it said that the CMD rate had the biggest effect on memory performance.

Command Rate: The results achieved by relaxing the command rate were dramatic. It was found to have the most significant impact on system performance, showing a 3.29% performance decrease when changing from 1T to 2T. To confirm these results, we performed the same analysis using Sandra. To our surprise, we found that of the roughly 17% performance decrease seen in Sandra when changing settings from 2-2-2-5-1T to 3-3-3-8-2T, over 90% of this increase was due to command rate alone!

[The_Ghost]

well i went all over my bios to double check , no place to change the command rate , i wonder if it is built into the chipset for the command rate to be 2T

[Terrahawk]

funny thing is that many web sites I found off google say that the nforce 2 is locked to a 1T command rate... wonder why Sandra reports it as 2T?

[The_Ghost]

that is a good question

you know i was satisfied with my rig , until you brought this up :D

well it won't be long and it will be time to upgrade anyway , k8 is knocking on my door step , i know i can get it to the 1T command ;)

[sadtherobot]

The nForce2 doesn't give you control over command rate. I'm not sure what command rate it is locked at, but Sandra almost always reports command rate incorrectly for any chipset, even the new versions can't report it right on the Athlon64. The reason it reports it incorrectly is because it doesnt look at the command rate, it looks at some other latency setting like tRTW or twCL (I can't remember which timing, those 2 were guesses, but I know for sure it isn't any of the normal latency settings).