Confusion about Santa Rosa

[yadmonkey]

I've been reading through threads about Santa Rosa this and that, but I'm still pretty confused about what makes it so special. I guess my biggest question is this - what is the use of an 800 mHz bus if your RAM is limited to 667 mHz? I don't pretend to understand these things, so if someone could enlighten me, I'd very much appreciate it.

 

[heatasmallhouse]

so you can upgrade to 800Mhz in the future when they make chips cheap enough.

i'd say thats a lot better than limiting it to 667Mhz and stopping you from upgrading to 800Mhz some day.

 

[dooyou]

so you can upgrade to 800Mhz in the future when they make chips cheap enough.

i thought that santa rosa does only support 667 mhz ddr2 ram chips?

 

[yadmonkey]

so you can upgrade to 800Mhz in the future when they make chips cheap enough.

i'd say thats a lot better than limiting it to 667Mhz and stopping you from upgrading to 800Mhz some day.

I've never heard of a memory bus which was forward-compatible... in other words, you can usually install faster RAM and it will run at the slower speed of your memory bus, but you can't add faster RAM and have it run faster.

So what I'm wondering is how much of a bottleneck is the RAM speed, if at all? It's all well and good to make a fast FSB, but will it be limited by the RAM speed?

 

[SWC]

Santa Rosa DOES NOT I repeat DOES NOT support 800 MHz ram.