Are the Bus Speeds for IDE cables always 133 mhz??

[TriAxis]

I have an Asus P4S533 motherboard with a 533mhz Front Side Bus.
I use 1 GB of 333mhz Ram. I installed this program by Asus.
This program tells info about your computer, like Processor Speed,
Amount of memory, BIOS info, etc. etc. etc.
Theirs this one section and all it says is "Bus Speed 133mhz"
Anyone know what this means. Cuz if my memory is only clocking at
133mhz or my FSB is not configured right I need to fix it.
I think this might be the speed of the IDE cables, for data to and
from my HardDrives. But I don't know for sure. Any info would help.

[citi]

It's kinda confusing and I don't know it that well myself but i believe you have a dual pipe frontside bus so in theory if you would be running at 266mhz on the frontside bus. If you increased your bus to 200 you would be running on a 400 mhz frontside bus. Chances are your mb supports up to 266 mhz (double and you have 533). The ram works the same way. So increase your frontside bus which could overclock your system. You don't say which processor you have. The higher you increase your bus, the faster your processor will go the hotter it will get. I run my xp2500 on the asus a7n8x and it runs comfortablt at 166 bus. When I go to 200 it thinks my system is a xp3200.

Does it make sense?

[rage_ele]

"133" is refering to the ata specification of your ide channels on the mobo.
there are different ata standards for ide such as 66/100/and yep 133 which is apparantly
what you have. your memory and fsb have nothing to do with your ata specification.
you should be good as far as your fsb speed (533Mhz) and memory speed (333Mhz) on the P4S533.

Side Note: Digidesign recomends NOT using SiS chipset based motherboards wich is what
is on your Asus P4S533.
good luck.

[TriAxis]

Thanks Rage_ele I think you answered my question.
Now my new question, is their a faster ATA Standards speed than 133mhz
for the IDE channels. If so is it motherboard limited or can you
change settings in the BIOS or in XP to speed it up.
As for the SIS chipset, I havent had any problems with that.
I do have to disable my motherboard built in sound, to get ProTools
to run. But besides that my PC runs superfast.
Does anyone know what the big deal is with the SIS chipsets.
I didnt do enough research when I bought it and found out later
that the SIS was unsupported, but no complaints so far.

[nikki-k]

Hi!
Here wego- I will be wrong on this, can see it already, but...

Couple things come into play here.
Standard IDE using PATA (the "normal" hard drives you are used to) use two types of cables currently: 40 and 80 pin. The 40 pin are restricted to 66mhz I think, cant remember off-hand. The 80-pin allow the 133mmhz. The IDE interface (and corresponding chipset) do up to 150MBps. SATA is the only IDE based drive capable of coming anywhere close to reaching this limit, and only with more than one drive in the chain. Ultra-ATA (P-UATA if you will) only reach about 70 MBs on a good day. Upcoming SATA II will really give SCSI a run for the money, but SCSI 320 wil still have an edge, and the drives themselves are what actually set the two camps apart, with SCSi being the adults, and ATA of any variety being the children.

IDE drives have a few things going against them, when comparing to SCSI high performance drives. For one, SCSI drives have more circuitry aiding their performance (just lok at the underside of one alongside th eother). RPM speed is generally faster with SCSI as well, but a 10K drive will do quite well, even when it is a PATA IDE Drive. The controller and it's interaction with the processor is another area SCSI leads in.

All that said, only when you get into high track counts, and/or 24/96+ work do you see the limits of IDE being realized fully. With a good 10k rpm, low 5.? seek IDE drive, life is good. Not quite as good as the multi-drive Ultra320 SCSI thousands of dollars system, but close enough to make the justification of money spent on that super-SCSI array non-existent. Off my two IDE P-UATA drives, I had 192 tracks at 24/44.1, and 90 tracks off one @ 24/96 with my HD Accel system. "Hit Play to actual start" time was around one second (+ or -) at full capabilities load (90 tracks @ 24/96, edits, automation, filled DSP for all cards). Under *normal* sesion conditions, this delay is mere milliseconds, not enough to justify the SCSI purchase (for me).

As far as SiS chipsets go...Digi will only qualify a chipset if it works, and also works well. The chipsets approved for use with the TDM HD systems for instance- only chipsets on boards utilizing RAMBUS memory are approved. However, I and several other Win TDM HD users have found the latest 875p chipset to be far superior in a few ways, and it utilizes DDR. Previously, it was a well known fact that RAMBUS outperformed DDR, especially since RAMBUS uses dual channel mode. With DDR boards using this mode as well now (optionally), DDR is up to par with RAMBUS. The point? I always wondered if Digi did not qualify other chipsets before due to the inferior performance of DDR, and it's implementation at the time. SiS chipsets have been shown to be inferior, and at times difficult to stand behind when developing for as being stable and usable. This may be one of the contributing factors, along with repeated failures of SiS chipsets from the past. As with any technology: What doesnt work for one person, may work for another, and vice-versa

[QuikDraw]

...The 40 pin are restricted to 66mhz I think, cant remember off-hand. The 80-pin allow the 133mmhz...

Nikki,

You started off with the wrong terminology, and then you corrected yourself... Shifting gears on the fly so to speak.

ATA (or EIDE) speeds are not specified in MHz. ATA numbers are specified in Burst Transfer Rate. As you later stated, and continued to use the correct term through the rest of your post, these Burst Transfer Rate numbers are in Mega Bytes Per Second (MBps)

That is, by the way, Burst Transfer Rate. That's the most data they can pump for a fraction of a second. They cannot sustain those high rates, and don't claim to.

Yeah, I know... knit-picking!

Mike

PS. I originally thought it was Mega bits Per Second (Mbps) (notice the lowercase 'b'), but after checking a few HDD Web sites I note that they are all using the uppercase 'B,' meaning Bytes, not Bits. (Bytes are bigger, and bigger's better!)

[rage_ele]

Now my new question, is their a faster ATA Standards speed than 133mhz
for the IDE channels. If so is it motherboard limited or can you
change settings in the BIOS or in XP to speed it up.

To answer your question, 133 is the fastest ata ide spec/standard currently availiable
for most pc motherboard manufac. like asus and it is limited to your mobo; you will not be able to speed this up in bios or xp.

if you want better performance with what you have look into checking to see if your ide or eide
hard drives have buffer cache on them. this greatly improves disk performance.
Here: http://www.westerndigital.com/en/pro...asp?DriveID=42 is an example of some western digital hard drives with 8mb buffer cache. im currently running my asus A7V8X-X w/ 2 western digital EIDE 80Gb hard drives with 8mb buffer on each. its nice.

however there are faster disk types (sata and scsi) mentioned by nikki. sata is quickly emerging
as the newer, faster, next generation disk standard for pc motherboards becuase it is quite abit faster. scsi is typically a commercial/industrial disk standard not typical for home pc (pretty heavy duty, pretty $$$, ide and sata are fine for ptle

I will be wrong on this, can see it already, but...

oh my, quite contrary.

Not quite as good as the multi-drive Ultra320 SCSI thousands of dollars system, but close enough to make the justification of money spent on that super-SCSI array non-existent. Off my two IDE P-UATA drives, I had 192 tracks at 24/44.1, and 90 tracks off one @ 24/96 with my HD Accel

non-existent is right. there is no IDE P-UATA drive in existence. not sure where that came from...

rage

[nikki-k]

non-existent is right. there is no IDE P-UATA drive in existence. not sure where that came from...

rage

P-UATA is my own acronym for the non-serial, ultra ata (100/133) drives people will *typically* use today. While this is not how they are referred to acronym-wise, it was the only way I could think of to differentiate between SATA, ATA 33/66 IDE, and Ultra ATA 100/133 EIDE. I think the Ultra in Ultra ATA is a reference to the Ultra DMA modes (typically Ultra DMA 5 being used) availble with this spec? Dunno- never thought about where the Ultra came from.

Yeah- I oopsed on the mhz/MBps thing. I actually had a sentence perceding that saying the mhz being discussed in one answer should have been MBps, but I dont know what happened to it- too many painkillers...

As far as the original question:
When it comes to buss speeds, there are frequency and multiplier values that contribute to the final "value." Basically, you have RAM frequency, FSB freq, and AGP/PCI freq. In th epast, raising the FSB to get the CPU to "overclock" would raise the other two, which was a major roadblock, since a good number of PCI cards, and most graphics cards (AGP) would dislike their buss freq increasing as well. Newer boards now allow seperate tweaking of each buss (VERY cool ), so the AGP/PC buss can be left alone, while the CPU/FSB can be tweaked for optimum perf, while the RAM freq can be tweaked sperately, along with other RAM settings. Awesome stuff.

I highly suggest grabbing a current, up-to-date book on the basics. Or, spend an hour or so with Google and a few sites that explain the basics. There are many out there. Macs are great for people who do not want or care to know this stuff. Sorry, but I feel the heart of a *true* PC user lies in the WANTING to know, and play with this stuff. If not play, then at least understand, and be able to be self-sufficient with their system. PC users not fitting this catagory did so simply to spend less money. Personally, if I had fallen in the latter, I would have waited an extra month and saved the extra for the Mac.