just wondering....

i just downloaded Everest and the things it tells me bout my computer i am not sure about. Firstly, this dual RAM thing... does it mean if 2 RAM chips are plugged into the same group of sockets it will run faster, cos right now their plugged across both groups. Also, my motherboard (D865PERL, Intel) is advertised as having a FSB as 800mhz, but everest says that its effective clock is indeed 800mhz, but its real clock is only 200mhz? is this normal or is there a way i can make this faster, or are they 2 different things? its memory bus is also effective at 400mhz, but real at 200mhz.

 

Just to add on to MT:

The FSB clock speed for your machine is 800MHz. That's the clock speed between your CPU and the northbridge. The clock speed for the memory bus is actually 200 MHz, but it does a really good job of pretending to be 800 MHz.

Now, the memory that you have in your machine is DDR RAM... double data rate. Single data rate RAM operates once per bus clock cycle. Double data rate, on the other hand, operates twice per bus clock cycle. That means that while the clock speed of the memory bus is 200 MHz, the data rate of the memory bus is double that: 400 MHz. That's where "DDR400" comes from. Since the width of the memory bus is 64 bits or 8 bytes, we can calculate the actual bandwidth of the memory to 400 MHz * 8 B = 3200 MB/s. And that's where "PC3200" comes from.

In a single channel setup, there is only one memory bus connected to the northbridge. In a dual channel setup, there are two identical and separate memory busses. Each bus operates at DDR400, so there's an effective data rate of 800 MHz. So the memory bus clock speed is 200 MHz, but the data rate is 800 MHz, or 6400 MB/s.

A schematic of your chipset is below. Remember, 400 MHz = 3.2 GB/s, 800MHz = 6.4 GB/s. This is true for both the FSB and the memory bus because they have the same width (64 bits).
http://www.intel.com/design/chipsets/865PE/pix/865PE_schematic.gif